1. Apparitions hover (vignette-like) over my right shoulder.
Chill in this shoulder. In this context: "I have the feeling that there
are 4 in the room apart from myself." (Avoidance of the necessity to
include myself.)

2. Elucidation of the Potemkin anecdote[1]
by the explanation, be it suggestion: to present to a person the mask of
their own face (i.e., of the bearer's own face).

4. The co-ordinates through the apartment: cellar-floor/
horizontal line. Spacious horizontal expanse of the apartment. Music is
coming from a suite of rooms. But perhaps the corridor [is] terrifying,
too.

5. Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety
complex. The beautiful "character" unfolds. All of those present
become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.

6. The comical is not only drawn out of faces but also
out of situations. One searches out occasions for laughter. Perhaps it is
for that reason that so much of what one sees presents itself as "arranged",
as "test": so that one can laugh about it.

7. Poetic evidence in the phonetic: for a while at one
point, no sooner had I made an assertion than I'd have used the very word
in answer to a question merely by the perception ( so to speak) of the length
of time in the duration of sound in either of the words. I sense that as
poetic evidence.

8. Connection; distinction. Feeling of little wings growing
in one's smile. Smiling and flapping as related. One has among other things
the feeling of being distinguished because one fancies oneself in such a
way that one really doesn't become too deeply involved in anything: however
deeply one delves, one always moves on a threshold. Type of toe dance of
reason.

9. It is often striking how long the sentences one speaks
are. This, too, connected with horizontal expansion and (to be sure) with
laughter. The arcade phenomenon is also the long horizontal extension, perhaps
combined with the line vanishing into the distant, fleeting, infinitesimal
perspective. In such minuteness there would seem to be something linking
the representation of the arcade with the laughter. (Compare Trauerspiel
book: miniaturizing power of reflection). [2]

10. In a moment of being lost in thought something quite
ephemeral arises, like a kind of inclination to stylize [a few words here
illegible] one's body by oneself.

11. Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of transport.
Considerable sensitivity towards open doors, loud talk, music.

12. Feeling of understanding Poe much better now. The entrance
gates to a world of grotesques seem to open up. I simply prefer not to enter.

13. Heating-oven becomes cat. Mention of the word 'ginger'
in setting up the writing table and suddenly there is a fruitstand there,
which I immediately recognize as the writing table. I recalled the 1001
Nights.

14. Thought follows thought reluctantly and ponderously.

15. The position which one occupies in the room is not
held as firmly as usual. Thus it can suddenly happen --to me it transpired
quite fleetingly --that the entire room appears to be full of people.

16. The people with whom one is involved (particularly
Joël and Fränkel) are very inclined to become somewhat transformed:
I wouldn't say that they become alien nor do they remain familiar, but rather
resemble something like foreigners.

17. It seemed to me: pronounced aversion to discuss matters
of practical life, future, dates, politics. The intellectual sphere is as
spellbinding as is the sexual at times to persons possessed, who are absorbed
in it.

18. Afterwards with Hessel in the cafe. Departure from
the spirit-world. Wave farewell.

19. The mistrust towards food. A special and very accentuated
instance of the feeling which a great many things occasion: "Surely
you don't really mean to look that way!"

20. When he spoke of 'ginger', H[essel]'s writing table
was transformed for a second into a fruitstand.

21. I associate the laughter with the extraordinary fluctuations
of opinion. More precisely stated, it is, among other things, connected
with the considerable sense of detachment. Furthermore, this insecurity
which possibly increases to the point of affectation is to a certain extent
an outward projection of the inner feeling of ticklishness.

22. It is striking that the inhibiting factors which lie
in superstition, etc.,and which are not easy to designate, are freely expressed
rather impulsively without strong resistance.

23. In an elegy of Schiller's it is called "The Butterfly's
Doubting Wings" ["Des Schmetterlings zweifelnder Flügel''].[3] This in the connection of being exhilarated with the
feeling of doubt.

24. One traverses the same paths of thought as before.
Only they seem strewn with roses.

Protocol II: Highlights of the Second Hashish Impression[by Walter Benjamin:] Written 15 January 1928. 3:30 p.m.

The recollection is less vivid although the reverie [Versunkenheit]
was of a diminished intensity compared to the first time. To be precise,
I was not as lost in thought [versunken], but more profoundly inward. Also,
the gloomy, strange, exotic passages of the rausch haunt the recollection
more than the luminous ones.

I recall a satanic phase. The red of the walls became the
determining factor for me. My smile took on satanic features: although it
assumed more the expression of satanic knowledge, satanic satisfaction,
satanic repose than the satanic, destructive effect. The sense of those
present in the room as being submerged intensified: the room became more
velvety, more glowing, darker. I named it Delacroix.

The second, quite intense observation was the game with
the adjoining room. In general, one begins to play games with spaces. Beguilements
of one's sense of direction arise. What's recognized in an alert state in
the quite unpleasant displacement which is accidentally conjured when, traveling
at night on the rear seat of a train, one imagines one's traveling on the
front seat or the reverse, can be experienced as beguilement from the translation
of motion into the static.

The room disguises itself before our eyes, wraps itself
up like an alluring creature in the costumes of the dispositions. I experience
the feeling that not only the imperial coronation of Charlemagne, but the
murder of Henry IV, the ratification of the Treaty of Verdun and the murder
of Egmont were enacted in the next room. Things are only mannequins and
even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they
exchange glances of assent with nothingness, with the base and the banal.
They respond to the ambiguous winking of nirvana across the way. To resist
becoming implicated in any way in such assent, then, is what accounts for
the "satanic satisfaction" previously referred to. This is also
the root of addiction, to immensely heighten the collusion with non-existence
by intensifying the dosage. Perhaps it is no self-deception to say that
in this state one develops an aversion towards the free, so-to-speak uranian
atmosphere in which thoughts of the "outside" become almost agonizing.
Unlike the first time, there is no longer the friendly, amiable lingering
in the room out of pleasure in the situation for its own sake. Rather, a
thick, self-woven, self-spun spiderweb in which world affairs hang strewn
about like the corpses of insects sucked dry. Here, too, the rudiments of
a hostile stance towards those present in the room take shape; fear that
they will become a bother or could drag one down.

Yet despite its depressive elements, this rausch has its
cathartic outcome which, if not blissful like the last, nonetheless has
its ingenious side which is not without its charm. Except that this comes
to a peak as the effect wears off, which sets forth the context of depression
more clearly. For this reason the increase of dosage could, under certain
circumstances, play a part in the depressive character.

Double structure of this depression: first fear and then
indecision in related questions of practicality. This indecision has gained
mastery: suddenly a coercive temptation is tracked down to a very concealed
motive [Moment]. The possibility of yielding to it somewhat with
the prospect of overcoming it is therefore attained.

Hunger set as an oblique axis through the system of the
rausch.

The great hope, inclination, longing to approach the new,
the untouched in the rausch can hardly be attained any longer in elated
fluttering, rather in tired, self-absorbed, relaxed, idle, sluggish downhill
mutation. In this descent, one still believes in developing a certain friendliness,
a certain attractiveness [Attrativa] in order to carry friends along
with one's dark-edged smile, half Lucifer, half Hermes traducens, no longer
the spirit and human being of the last experience. Less human, more daimon
and pathos in this rausch.

The bad simultaneity of the need to be alone and the desire
to stay together with others intensifies --a feeling which emerges in deeper
fatigue, and which one would have indulged. One has the feeling of only
being able to abandon oneself to this ambiguous winking of nirvana across
the way entirely by oneself in the profoundest silence, and yet needs the
presence of others as gently shifting relief figures on the pedestal of
one's own throne.

Hope as cushion which lies beneath one only just now taking
effect.

The first rausch made me familiar with the fickleness of
doubt; the doubting lay within me myself as creative indifference. The second
experiment, however, caused things to appear dubious.

Tooth operation. Noteworthy memory shift. Even now I cannot
free myself from the mental image, that the location had been on the left
side.

On the way home as well, when the latch on the bathroom
door is hard to lock, the suspicion: experimental set-up.

One hears the tuba mirans sonans, plants oneself in vain
resistance against the tombstone.

It is well-known that when one closes one's eyes and gently
presses against them ornamental figures appear whose form we have no influence
upon. The architectures and spatial constellations which one sees before
one's eyes on hashish have something related to them in their origins. When
they appear and what they appear as is, first of all, involuntary, so lightning
quick and unannounced do they show themselves. Then when they are suddenly
there, effortless imagination comes more consciously in order to take certain
liberties with them.

One may well say in general that the sensation of "outside",
"outdoors" is connected to a certain feeling of aversion. One
must, however, sharply distinguish between the "outside" and the
still quite extended field of vision, which for the person in the hashish
rausch has exactly the same relation to the outside that the stage has to
the cold street for a theatergoer. Now and then, however, there is something
between the intoxicated person and their field of vision which --to continue
the metaphor-- is like a proscenium through which an entirely different
air sweeps through the outside. The proximity of death formulated itself
to me yesterday in the sentence: death lies between me and my rausch.

The image of autonomic signaling [Selbstanschluss]:
certain mental things of themselves have their say, like toothaches, which
at other times are rather fierce. All sensations, mental ones especially,
have a more intense gradient and seize the words from their lair.

This "ambiguous winking of nirvana across the way"
has certainly been nowhere as vivid as in Odilon Redon.

The first difficult impairment which took place was the
inability to make plans in advance. When we examine it closer it is astonishing
that we are capable of making plans from one day to the next, i.e. beyond
our usual daydreams. Very difficult to have the dreams (or the rausch) on
hashish at one's disposal.

Bloch wanted to gently touch my knee. I had already perceived
this touch long before the sensation of it reached me: I perceive it as
a highly unpleasant violation of my aura. To understand that one has to
bear in mind that all movements appear to gain in intensity and methodicalness
and that as such they become perceived as unpleasant.

After-effect: perhaps a certain weakening of the will.
But as the effect wears off exhilaration gains the upper hand. Does the
recent tendency of my handwriting to incline upwards [aufwärtssteigende
Schriftrichtung] (despite more frequent depressions) have anything to
do with hashish?[4]

Another after-effect: on my way home I secure the latch
and when there is some difficulty in doing so my first (and immediately
corrected) thought: experimental set-up?

Although the first rausch stood morally high above the
second, the climax of the intensity is indeed increasing. This is to be
understood more or less in the following way: the first intoxication loosened
and lured the things out of their customary world while the second rausch
soon placed them in a new one extensively underlying this interstice.

Concerning the continuous digressions in hashish. First
of all, the inability to listen. However disproportionate this seems in
relation to that boundless benevolence towards others, it is nonetheless
actually rooted in it. Before one's [conversation] partner has barely opened
his mouth, he disappoints us immensely. What he says lags endlessly far
behind what we would so gladly have credited him with and believed him capable
of had he remained silent. He disappoints us painfully in his unresponsive
attitude towards that greatest object of all attention: ourselves.

As for our own distracted, abrupt switch from the subject
under discussion, the feeling that corresponds to the physical interruption
of contact can be explained thus: we are endlessly allured with whatever
we are directly engaged in discussing; we fondly stretch out our arms towards
whatever we have a vague notion of. Barely have we touched it, however,
than it disappoints us corporeally: the object of our attention withers
away under the touch of language. It ages in years, our love has completely
exhausted it in a single instant. Thus does it rest until it seems to become
alluring enough to lead us back to it.

To return to the colportage phenomenon of the room: the
possibility of all things which have potentially taken place in this room
is perceived simultaneously. The room winks at one: so, what may have happened
to me? The connection of this phenomenon to the colportage. Colportage and
caption. To visualize it thus: one pictures to oneself a kitschy chromolithograph
on the wall with a longish strip carved out of the lower part of the frame.
A ribbon runs along this lower part and now captions alternating with one
another appear in the niche: "Murder of Egmont", "Imperial
Coronation of Charlemagne" etc.

In our experiment I repeatedly saw porticos with oriel
windows and once said: I see Venice, but it looks like the upper part of
the Kurfurstenstraße.

"I feel weak" and "I know myself weak"
--those are two radically different intentions. Perhaps the first one alone
really carries the punch. But on hashish one can talk almost exclusively
about the rule of the second and perhaps that explains why the facial expression
is impoverished, despite the intensified "inner life". The difference
between these two intentions is to be investigated.

Further: function shift [Funktionsverschiebung].
I take this term from Joël. The following experience suggested it to
me. During the satanic phase I was handed a book by Kafka. The title read
Betrachtung [Meditation]. [5]But then all
at once this book meant to me what a book in a poet's hands means to a somewhat
academic sculptor who has to sculpt a statue of this poet. It was immediately
dovetailed by myself into the sculptural construction of my person and was
consequently subject to me in a much more brutal and absolute manner than
could have been accomplished by the most withering critique.

But there was still something else: namely, it was as if
I were in flight from Kafka's spirit and now in the moment when he had touched
me, I were metamorphisized into stone as Daphne was changed into ivy under
Apollo's touch.

Connection of the colportage-intention with the most profoundly
theological. It reflects it opaquely, displacing to the space of contemplation
what is intended only in the space of daily life. Namely: time and again
the world is the same (that everything which has ever happened could have
been enacted in the same room). In a theoretical sense, that is a tired,
withered truth, despite all the insight concealed in it, which nonetheless
finds its greatest confirmation in the existence of the devout, to whom,
as here, the space of imagination serves as all that has been, and thus
all things serve to the best. The theological is so deeply sunken in the
realm of colportage that one may say: the profoundest truths, aspired to
far away from the oppressive, animal truths of men, still possess the violent
force capable of adapting themselves to the oppressive and the common, to
even mirror themselves in their own way in irresponsible dreams.

Ernst Bloch: Protocol of the Same Experiment

I eat nothing. Energy of the silence remains. Energy from
fasting is lost when one is sated.

The rausch today compares to the previous one as Calvin
to Shakespeare. This is a Calvinist rausch.

Now I am in a state of indolent, sinking longing. It is
always just such an ambiguous winking of nirvana across the way. Allegory
of peace, arcadia rises oppressively to the surface. That is all that remained
of Ariel. That's the purest measure of the relation between this rausch
and the first.

When even I, to whom things are going in a worldly way,
going badly (depressed),sense this winking, then see what power it has.
Yes, it is the smile. The smile is the veiled image of Sais. [6]

It's now as if something had taken me by the hand to the
sought after cleft in the rocks. But that too becomes just a rained-out
rendezvous with the spirits. A rained-out Venice similar to the Kurfürstenstraße.
But at the same time I enjoy this rain-laden humor; look down from the window
with the pipe. I talk with intention of saying something florid; they must
be suspicious.

It is as if the words were suggested to one phonetically.
There is automatic signaling [Selbstanschluß] here. Things
have their say without asking for permission. That ascends into very high
spheres. There is a silent password with which certain things now pass through
the gate.

The depressive mood nonetheless becomes more absorbing.
Fear of it going away and being absorbed with it are simultaneous. Am only
capable of retaining the emotional atmosphere of the depression, not its
contents.

Again a powerful feeling of being at sea. The phase-like
= sea voyage, life in the cabin: it is perfectly clear, it is the world
seen through glass. A web now fashions itself, everything joins forces with
the black background as in bad engravings. Hashish interweaves the entire
space.

Pause (I take Kafka's Betrachtung [Meditation] as
support). Benj[amin]:"That's the right support" --Myself: "You
couldn't find one more refined." Benj[amin]: "None more well-informed".

Stairway in the studio: a structure only fit for wax figures
to inhabit.

Thereupon I begin so much graphically. All of Piscator
can pack up and go. Have the possibility of rearranging the entire lighting
with tiny little lever. Can make out the London Opera from the Goethehaus.
Can read all of history out of it. It appears to me in the room, and that's
why I focus on the colportage images. Can see everything in the room; the
sons of Richard III and whatever you please.

In addition, things participate in my depression = devaluation
of their matter. They become mannequins. Unattired dress-up puppets awaiting
my intention, standing about naked, everything about them instructive like
an anatomical model. No, it's this: they stand there without an aura. Through
my smile. Through my smile all things stand under glass.

Now a passage emerges between the easel and stairs through
which the breath of death gently caresses. The death which is between me
and the rausch. It forms a snow-covered path leading into the rausch beyond.
This path is death.

To Fränkel, who comes down the stairs: You have turned
into a lady. You always wind up with a frock between your feet, like webs.

When W[alter] B[enjamin] was urged: "No, I don't want
anything. Even if you have to reprimand me in iambs [sich zu diesem Zweck
Jamben vorbinden], I won't eat anything."

At the end: step outside into a May evening from my castle
in Parma. Walk so gently, so softly, the ground is silk.

To me: (in parting) Stay identical for a while yet!

Postscript: When Dr. Fränkel wanted to write something
down: "Ah, now I'm coming into the palace gardens again, where my every
step is recorded."

Walter Benjamin: Bloch's Protocol to the Experiment
of 14 January 1928

The sequential order is loose [frei, free].

[Trans. note--- Passages which repeat Bloch's protocol
verbatim (see above) have not been included
here.]

Likewise to Fränkel: Now that you've stepped outside,
the street intercedes on your behalf. You come back entirely transformed.

At any moment now I'll be knocking on the ceiling which
is terribly thin.

In other words, an impetus to wakefulness.

Fall down the steps again; fanciful [lustvoll].
It begins to get light outside.

Now I luckily have everything but what the servant girls
buy for 25 pfennigs in an Egyptian dreambook.

Death as zone which surrounds the rausch.

State of inner listlessness.

Now I am not going through an African phase, but rather
a Celtic one. It's getting progressively brighter.

Given the opportunity to say what I had elaborated on earlier:
"Now I am the schooled teacher".

Something or other "spills over the depressive state"
(the opposite of aufheben[7]: überspülen
[to spill or wash over].

Hence it can be seen precisely what one is lacking in order
to be happy.

That is the sad evidence. Indeed, it is quite comical.
Dying has an entirely different imperative than it did the first time.

Exhalations from the earth. Intermediate step. Illumination
of the rausch.

More chthonic. Saw a flight of steps leading down to us,
so that we were to a certain extent sitting underground

Protocol III: Walter Benjamin: Protocol of the Hashish
Experiment of 11 May 1928

V.P. [Versuchsperson, Test Subject] : Joël

At [...] o'clock, Joël ingested [...] g [rams] of
Cannabis ind[icae].

J[oël] showed up at Benjamin's around 10:30. After
having taken the dosage earlier, he had led a meeting in the House of Public
Health [Gesundheitshaus] and had taken part in the discussion without
any hindrance. As there was still no visible effect by 11 o'clock, the outcome
of the experiment promised to be quite negligible. Though to himself he
seems to have changed, this is not apparent to the observer. The conversation
was initiated by B[enjamin]'s works, and turned of its own accord to questions
of an erotic nature, viz. sexual-pathological documents (from the collection
of Magnus Hirschfeld). Benjamin placed an album with explicit illustrations
in front of the test subject. Effect: nil. The conversation remains purely
scientific.

However, curious mimetic anticipations, so-to-speak, occur
to B[enjamin], who frequently loses the thread of the conversation, unlike
J[oël], and offers a light when J[oël] reaches for a biscuit.

After 11 o'clock, a call from Fränkel, who promises
to come. This conversation strikes the observer as itself the triggering
factor of the hashish rausch. First (moderate) attack of laughter on the
telephone. After conversation ended, strong impression of the room, to which
it should be noted: the telephone is not located in B[enjamin]'s room, but
in the adjacent flat; to reach the room in question, one must pass through
a third room. J[oël] wishes to remain in the room where he made the
phone call, but is very unsure. He doesn't venture to rest against a pillow
in the corner of the sofa but takes up a position in the middle of it.

[His] power of observation had already intensified (relative
to B[enjamin]'s more normal one, which is the only standard of comparison
in this case) before passing through the middle room. This hallway is filled
with framed specimens of handwriting. J[oël] at once discovers a chart
which is discernible as having to do with a collection documenting the history
of written characters. B[enjamin] has never noticed this chart. More astonishing
yet, on the way back through this room: a violet-colored balloon is tied
to the back of a chair. B[enjamin] doesn't see it at all. J[oël] is
startled. The source of light in front of the balloon appears to J[oël]
secretly as an ultraviolet lamp, which he calls "apparatus".

With the transition to the new milieu in B[enjamin]'s room,
there is at once a complete disorientation of the sense of time. The ten
minutes which have elapsed since the telephone conversation seem to him
like half an hour. The following period is characterized by a restless anticipation
of Fränkel. The phases are outwardly recognizable by repeated deep
breaths. Discussion of J[oël]'s formulation: "I've miscalculated
the time." Other formulations: "My watch is running backwards,"
"I would like to stand in between the double-glazing [of the window
pane]," "Fränkel could in fact be gradually about to appear
now." Standing at the window, J[oël] sees two cyclists: "He
cannot come by bicycle, to be sure. Let alone by twos!"

Later on, a phase of deep absorption in thought of which
but a few isolated details here can be retained. Divagation on the word
"Kollege " [colleague]. Etymological considerations. B[enjamin]
finds this quite remarkable, for he had quietly pondered over the etymology
of this word eight hours earlier the same day. He attempts to communicate
that to J[oël]. The latter sternly refuses: "I cannot stand these
mediumistic [mediumistisch] conversations among intellectuals."

Other formulations whose context I can no longer reconstruct:
"Shall I in the meantime talk malthusianistically [malthusianistisch]?"
"Every mother with 5 children can say that." (That can be said
of every mother with 5 children?) ["Opponenz" "Alimentenz"]
Divagation on "wild men" "symmetry of loutish men".
(Related perhaps to the title like the one in the Vossische Zeitung)
[8]. New divagations on an intermediate thing between Kaiser and Kautsky".
(Aimed at B[enjamin]).

"Always a house with lines in such a manner and candlestick
shapes (deep sigh). Candlestick shapes immediately remind me of something
sexual. Must be something sexual for the sake of appearances." The
word "secretorium" [Sekretorium] arises in this context.
As soon as I confirm a sentence of his, he perks up in a more lucid phase,
to judge from his words. "I've just come up with the lift." Other
reflections: "I only know that which is entirely formal...and not even
that anymore." Or: "As I said that, I was the church." Or:
"Now that was really something...Ach Gott, but of course those are
impersonations of an inferior kind." Or: "One sees the gold nuggets
lying there, but one can't lift them." [He] holds forth at length now
on lifting and seeing as two totally different actions, as if he were making
a discovery.

When the opportunity arises, B[enjamin] is emboldened to
remark that no solution to contact between himself and J[oël] has happened.
J[oël] reacts in an extraordinarily vehement manner: solution to contact
[Kontaktlösung] said to be a contradictio in adjecto. Then echolalia
(perceiving [perzipierend]?): "Contact, out-tact, by tact, with
tact in Spain"["Kontakt, Austakt,durch Takt, mit Takt
in Spanien"]. This is a divagation from an earlier stage of the
experiment. Other divagations: B[enjamin] lets drop the word "parallels",
to which there is a reaction: "parallels intersect in infinity --surely
one can see that."-- Then lively doubt, whether they intersect or not.

Fragment: "...By means of this thing, which in fact
should be a measure, or was, search me." Other deviations: "I
don't believe it for a moment that you're attempting to make jokes. You're
too unsure of yourself for that."

After a period of time has elapsed I withdraw into the
background of the room onto the couch next to Fränkel. J[oël]
has a great liking for this arrangement. F[ränkel] is not well, he
stands up, and I accompany him out. He is gone for a long time. In his absence:
first J[oël] assumed that we were talking outside about experimental
procedures. But he drops it. Hears a rattling. Associates this with the
lighting of a candlestick. Believes that he saw how I guided Fränkel
to the toilet with a candlestick. Hereupon immediately follow still fairly
objective discussions. Gradual elucidaton.

Supplementary entry from the deepest phase: a corner of
my desk becomes for J[oël] a naval station, coaling-station, something
situated between Wittenberg and Jüterbog.[9]
"But all of it at the time of Waldersee." [10]
After that, there was a very remarkable, beautifully poetic divagation about
imagined schooldays in Myslowitz. Afternoon in the school, outside in the
fields [and] sun,etc. Then he loses himself in other images: Berlin. "One
must travel to the Orient to understand Ackerstraße."

From the phase of anticipating Fränkel's arrival:
"Now I'd like to sit on the window-sill." Afterwards a long divagation
on the word "threaten" [drohen]. "Fränkel threatens
to come". J[oël] himself also calls attention to another infantilism.
On occasion he has the feeling that F[ränkel] will break a promise
he has made, no matter which one. He is to have "shaken hands on it
(as boys tend to do)." End of the experiment around 3 o'clock.

Ernst Joël: Protocol to the Same Experiment

Anticipating Fränkel:

Having telephoned, one could expect F[ränkel] in about
20-30 minutes. We left the telephone room through the hallway with the development
of handwriting. A child's blue balloon was fastened to the back of a chair
at a table where a lamp stood. To me, the layout appeared instantly reversed
to the extent that the balloon was in front of the lamp which shone through
it, illuminating the room with a blue light, like a Solluxlampe [radiation
lamp]. I gave the balloon the name "apparatus".

Returning to B[enjamin]'s room, the tension of anticipation
increases at times to an agonizing intensity. In this context there were
considerable miscalculations of time so impressive that, for a moment, I
believed my watch was running backwards. The other things (the double-glazing,
the cyclist) are described in the protocol. [11]
What's peculiar is the intensification which is implied first in the mention
of the double-glazed window, then in [the mention of] the outer metal sill.

Some kind of infantile features are at play with the metal
sill. For example, it was clear to me that in this situation I would only
take up a little space on the sill, i.e., that I was a small boy.

At one time when I said "space" ["Raum"]
for outer space [Weltenraum], I believed [myself] to say something
new stylistically in so far as the semantic character of the thing were
intensified by grammatical incoherence. I wondered whether Morgenstern,
for example, would have had a much more powerful impact had he carried the
grotesqueness of his Palmström[12]
poems over into his cosmic poetry.

No doubt, my formulations seemed too daring to me, for
the most part, but nonetheless quite pertinent, and they disclosed to me
some rare perspectives. My doubt, however, was apparent as an almost constant
factor in my questions regarding the surroundings; whether my remarks stood
up to objective criticism.

Vodka:

I had the feeling of having to entertain F[ränkel]
somewhat, and it's certainly no accident that I directed him to the various
liqueurs which, for reasons of abstinence, were out of the question for
me, personally, and which were irrelevant to my hunger. It's worth noting
that I became so captivated by a bottle labeled as vodka that I wanted to
test its authenticity, which I doubted. Since the Treaty of Versailles had
forbidden the production of cognac in Germany, I believed that the Treaty
of Rapallo had allowed the Russians to keep their vodka, and it gave me
the greatest pleasure to see that the great conventions and treaties of
the nations were essentially matters regarding the regulation of spirits.
Contributing to this was the fact that, either this visit or the one before,
Benjamin had given me some genuine Russian cigarettes.

I sometimes had the feeling that I should mediate between
B[enjamin] and F[ränkel], although I wasn't aware of any kind of conflict.

The Medals:

Fränkel gave me a shallow cardboard box half-filled
with ginger. At the same time B[enjamin] handed me a little oval bowl with
biscuits. I took both of them, feeling as if I were being paid tribute.
Then both objects reminded me of medals, especially the bowl (which could
be compared to to a large badge for the wounded-in-action). F[ränkel]
and B[enjamin] seemed to me like prisoners, who voluntarily surrender their
medals as souvenirs (as the English did when captured). The remarkable thing
was that both of them lost their individuality at that moment and were only
generic, so to speak, though their presence as such was extraordinarily
clear. It was something humiliated, slavish.

All of these things condensed into something like permanent
realities.

As in other experiments, there were, of course, moments
of fleeting apparitions, but they were instantly divested of any semblance
of reality, which did not in the least spoil their relative wealth and tremendous
liveliness.

The Church:

At sometime or other all the food I had in my hands was
taken away from me. Then I recalled that a package of biscuits was lying
somewhat hidden to the right of my easy chair. I reached into it contentedly
and in so doing experienced such a remarkable crisscross of emotions of
martyrdom and well-being that I said: "Now I am the church." As
soon as I had expressed that, I felt like a fat, priestly prebendary sitting
in my easy-chair, but with an expression of great earnestness, almost sadness.

The Coaling-station:

A dish of cake was taken away from me. I thought that it
would be put back on the projecting edge of the desk where B[enjamin] was
sitting, but it was set down on the table out of my reach where F[ränkel]
was sitting. The edge of the desk which I had hoped for as a suitable depot,
my army's base so to speak, became for me a cape. The course which the dish
had traversed from my hands to the cape and from the cape to the table lying
in the dark like a dark continent was like the curve of steamship lines
on the map of a great transoceanic shipping firm. An important strategic
point, a coaling-station, had been taken away from me, and now I held forth
on the importance of said coaling-station, fulminating with the politics
of a little bourgeois schooled on local advertising. I was reminded of my
classmate Thiele, who once loudly interrupted a lesson in school: "Where
does the middle-class come in?". In the Anhalterstraße on the
way home after school one day, he had said of some political personality,
I think it was the President of Venezuela, that he should be made a head
shorter, a kind of terminology which was new to me then, and which I had
heard with a mixture of fascination and objection. The topographical distribution
of stages of development became clear in this context, to the extent that
I experienced the meaning of the coaling-station in a childhood milieu on
the one hand, but then also as a conversation on a passenger train near
Jüterbog. (Compare this to Myslowitz, where a shift back into the past
either vies with or combines with geographical remoteness.)

In Myslowitz:

B[enjamin], who was sitting only about two steps away most
of the time, looked very different in appearance during the experiment.
For example, the form and fullness of his face changed. The cut of his hair,
his eye-glasses made him first stern, then genial. During the experiment
I knew that, objectively speaking, he couldn't change so quickly, but the
impression at the time was so strong that it was considered the correct
one.

Once he was a Gymnasium student in a little eastern town.
He had a handsome cultivated study. I asked myself: where has this young
man acquired so much culture? What is his father's occupation? Draper or
grain agent? At this moment he seemed inattentive to me and I bid him to
recite. His attempt at recitation seemed very slow to me and I called him
to account. At this moment I saw a summer afternoon in the little eastern
town, very hot, the sun resting on the fields before the town; and afternoon
in the Gymnasium --a sign of the small town or of the past: science lesson
in the afternoon. Said the teacher: "So, please hurry up, we really
do not have much time here." I had to laugh, for in fact this hot summer
afternoon seemed predestined for nothing but time, and I could call to mind
nothing that would seem to take precedence at either this hour or in Myslowitz,
for that matter.

I believe I then told further how the Gymnasium students
imitate their teachers, exaggerating extravagantly with the German students'
unassuming talent for caricature: "...I really don't have any time."

Fränkel is led out by Benj[amin]

When this happened I assumed that both of them were in
the hallway or in the telephone room discussing the experiment. This became
exaggerated at once: they were talking about me, my character in particular.
Then I heard footsteps receding and a soft clinking. Now I saw how B[enjamin],
holding a candlestick with a burning candle in his hand, accompanied F[ränkel],
leading him to the door of a toilet and then handing him the candlestick.

This representation of the scene was something completely
without restraint and natural to me. If I'm not mistaken, I was automatically
reminded that we are no longer living in the age of candlesticks. The interesting
thing was that F[ränkel] in particular couldn't at all imagine that
the scene had actually taken place 20 years earlier, just as I had seen
it. [13] From this insufficiency of memory I most
clearly saw the great effect of the hashish with regard to the recapturing
of time. I saw before my eyes a little bracket holding a white candlestick
inside the W.C. In well-kept households, matches would never be lacking,
etc.

While F[ränkel] was outside I had all kinds of peculiar
fears and I asked B[enjamin] whether there were any cause for concern about
him. This scene reminded me quite a bit of an intermezzo in Wiesbaden, where
I had already been forced to consider transportation to the hospital and
so on. (Compare this with the experiment in question). [14].

Part and Opposite [Teil und Gegenteil]:

In this rausch a prominent part was played by the to and
fro of comprehension, the doubt between meaning and meaninglessness, the
banal and the significant. I said that in ordinary life doubt is less defined,
duller and more shadowy, whereas here part and opposite present themselves
with equally sharp definition and vie with one another to the point of being
painful. This became apparent to me in the image of the two sails on the
Wannsee. It would be false to ask: which is the correct one. This image
is worth noting because there is no contradiction between the two sails,
and only the meaning which one attributes to each of them could constitute
the contradiction. Seen in such a way from the distance, two enemy ships
navigating towards one another without their flags hoisted could be taken
as allies. In this image it becomes clear that the flag-character, the sign
or insignia is actually what is significant here and this observation leads
us to the following: that within the rausch emphasis is universally distributed,
as is never the case otherwise. The externalization of the personality (spoken
of in very general terms) makes one capable of an expansion of partisanship
such as one would have to attribute to a divine being, or to an impartiality
such as is characteristic of, say, an animal. If I am not mistaken, B[enjamin]
spoke of an "agreement" [Vereinbarung], an expression which
was quite evident to me.

I further tried to show how that deeper kind of identification
is attained through cunning. Namely, that by means of mistaken identities
(possibly explained in the physiological terms of the senses, which are
corrected at once), affinities and identities, the lasting reward of this
error, establish a connection in a deeper sphere to which the error was
a bridge. (I see just now from F[ränkel's protocol that B[enjamin]
has spoken of "reconcilability" [Vereinbarkeit]. [15]

In this context belongs the turn of phrase to which I attached
great importance: "What you say is true, but I am right." Moreover,
it was quite clear to me that this "is true" was no comfortable
concession but rather a clear insight into the correctness of an adopted
viewpoint, further emphasizing that the word "also" in the formulation:
"You are right, but I am right also" immediately must make the
entire sense questionable.

On the Way Home:

Nighttime around 3 a.m. on the way home. First dim light
on the Hansa-shore. Strong, exceptionally blissful feeling of continuity:
these shores further down and the Arno flowing between them. It is the same
water only here it is called Spree.

After the acute state of rausch, with its isolations and
restrictions, it is possible that there is a sense of having a stronger
bond with world and humankind. This is quite evident in the experiments
of the Russians.

After long hesitation, took hashish at 7 o'clock in the
evening. During the day I had been in Aix. I am taking down notes of what
possibly follows only to determine whether it will take effect, as my solitariness
hardly allows for any other supervision. Next to me a small child is crying,
who disturbs me. I think that three quarters of an hour have already elapsed.
And yet it has actually been only half an hour. Thus... apart from a very
mild absent-mindedness, nothing's happening. I lay upon the bed, read and
smoked. All the while opposite me this glimpse of the ventre of Marseilles.
(Now the images begin to take hold of me.) The street that I'd so often
seen is like an incision cut by a knife.

Certain pages in Stepppenwolf, which I read early this
morning, were a final impetus to take hashish.

I definitely feel the effects now. Essentially negative,
in that reading and writing are difficult for me. A good three quarters
of an hour has transpired. No, it seems that much just won't come.

Just now the telegram from [Wilhelm] Speyer would have
to come: "Work on novel finally given up" etc. It does one no
good if, in spite of everything, disappointing news rains on the parade
of the oncoming Rausch. But is it really only this sort? For a moment there
was suspense as I thought, now [Marcel] Brion is coming up. I was intensely
excited.

(Postscript during dictation: Things happened in the following
way:

I lay upon the bed really with the absolute certainty that,
in this city of hundreds of thousands, where only one person knew me, I
would not be disturbed, when there was a knock at the door. That had never
happened to me here at all. Nor did I make any move whatsoever to open it,
but inquired about the matter without altering my position in the least.
The valet: "Il y a un monsieur, qui voudrait vous parler." --
"Faites le monter."

["A gentleman wishes to speak to you." --"Let
him come up."]. I stood leaning against the bedposts, my heart palpitating.
Really, it would have been quite remarkable to see Brion show up now. "Le
monsieur", however, was the dispatch courier.)

The following written the next morning. Under thoroughly
magnificent, mild after-effects which give me the lightheartedness not to
pay strict attention to the sequence. Of course, Brion didn't come. I finally
left the hotel, for it seemed to me that no effects were apparent or else
they were so weak as to overrule the precaution of staying in my room. First
station, the café at the corner of Cannebière and Cours Belsunce.
Viewed from the harbor, the one on the right and not my usual one. Now what?
Only that sure benevolence, the anticipation of seeing people amiably disposed
towards one. The feeling of loneliness quickly vanishes. My walking stick
becomes especially delightful to me. The handle of a coffeepot suddenly
looks very large and remains so. (One becomes so sensitive: afraid of being
hurt by a shadow falling across paper. --Disgust disappears. One reads the
slate on the pissoir.) I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. So-and-so came up
to me. That he doesn't do so does not matter to me, either. But it's too
loud for me there.

Now the demands which the hashish eater makes on time and
space come into play. They are, as is well-known, absolutely regal. Versailles
is not too great for one who has eaten hashish nor eternity too long-lasting.
And in the background of these immense dimensions of the inner adventure,
of absolute duration and the immeasurable spatial realm, a wonderful, blessed
humor now lingers all the more agreeably with the contingencies of the spatio-temporal
world. I am endlessly aware of this humor when I find out that the kitchen
at Basso's and the entire upstairs have just closed the very moment I've
sat down to tuck in eternity. All the same, the feeling afterwards that
all this indeed remains forever, constant, lit up, well-patronized and full
of life. Presently I must note how I happened to find a seat at Basso's.
To me it was a matter of the view of the Old Port which one had from the
upper storey. As I was passing by below I spied an unoccupied table on the
balcony of the second floor. In the end, however, I only got as far as the
first. Most of the tables by windows were occupied. So I walked over to
quite a large one which seemed to have just become free. The moment I sat
down, though, the disproportion became apparent to me: disgraceful to seat
myself this way at such a large table, so I walked on through the whole
floor towards the opposite end to take a seat at a smaller table which had
just then become visible.

But the meal was later. First, the little bar on the port.
I was again on the verge of making a confused retreat, for I heard a concert,
what's more a brass section, coming from that direction. I was just barely
able to account for it as nothing more than a honking car horn. On the way
to the vieux port [Old Port], already this wonderful lightness and determination
in my stride, which turned the stony, irregular pavement of the large public
square I crossed into the dirt of a country road which I, brisk wanderer,
traveled by night. For I still avoided the Cannebière at this time,
not being certain of my regular functions.

In that little port bar the hashish began to allow its
truly canonical magic free reign with a primitive acuity which I had hardly
experienced before. Namely, it began to make me a physiognomist, at any
rate an observer of physiognomies, and I witnessed something quite unique
in my experience: I became dead set on the forms in the faces around me,
which were partly of a remarkable rawness and ugliness; faces which I generally
would have avoided for two reasons: neither would I have wished to draw
their attention to myself, nor would I have been able to bear their brutality.
It was a seemingly advanced outpost, this port tavern. It was the one furthest
in that direction which was still accessible without putting me in danger,
and here in my rausch I had assessed it with the same certainty with which
a deeply exhausted person understands how to fill a glass to the very brim
without spilling a drop, whereas a person with refreshed senses would never
be in a position to do so. It was still far enough away from the rue Bouterie,
and yet no bourgeois were sitting there. At best there were a pair of petit
bourgeois families from the neighborhood sitting next to some of the authentic
harbor proletariat. I now grasped all at once how to a painter --has it
not happened to Rembrandt and many others? --ugliness is the true reservoir
of beauty, better than the receptacles of its treasure; just as the jagged
mountain chain could appear with all the interior Gold of the Beautiful
sparkling from its folded strata, vistas and ranges. I particularly recall
an infinitely bestial and vulgar face of one of the men, from which the
"wrinkles of abandon" suddenly struck me. It was men's faces which
appealed to me most. And now, too, I began the long sustained game in which
an acquaintance surfaced up in front of me in each new face. Often I knew
his name, often again not. The deception vanished as deceptions in dreams
vanish, that is, not in shame and with oneself compromised, but rather untroubled
and friendly like a being which has performed its obligation. Under these
circumstances there could be no talk of loneliness; was I my own companionship?
That certainly, though not quite so conspicuously. Nor do I know if that
would have particularly pleased me. This, on the contrary, was no doubt
more likely: I became my own shrewdest, most sensitive, most shameless pander,
and procured for myself with the ambiguous certainty of one who is intimately
acquainted with and has studied the desires of his customer. Then it began
to take half an eternity until the waiter appeared. Rather, I couldn't wait
for him to appear. I walked into the barroom and left the money on the table.
Whether tips are customary in such a tavern, I don't know. I would have
left something in any case, though, otherwise. Under hashish yesterday I
was stingier; it wasn't until I grew fearful that my extravagances would
attract attention that I really made myself conspicuous.

The same at Basso's, with the order. First I ordered a
dozen oysters. The man also wanted to know right then what was to be ordered
for the following course. I indicated a standard something or other. Then
he returned with the news that they were out of that. So I looked over the
menu at the other courses under the same section, seemed about to order
one when the name of another above it caught my eye, until I had reached
the top of the list. It was not out of gluttony, though, but rather a quite
pronounced politeness towards the entrés, which I didn't want to
insult by disregarding them. In short, I got stuck on a pâté
de Lyon. Lion pâté I thought, laughing facetiously as it sat
before me nicely on a plate, and then disdainfully: this delicate rabbit
--or chicken meat-- whatever it may be. To be sated on a lion would not
have seemed at all out of proportion to my lion appetite. Besides, it was
secretly all settled that I would go to another restaurant after I'd finished
at Basso's (that was around 10:30) and have dinner a second time.

First, however, [was] the way to Basso's. I glided along
the quayside and read one after another the names of the boats docked there.
At the same time I was overcome by an incomprehensible cheerfulness, and
I smiled in the face of all the first names of France there in a row. It
seemed to me that the love which was promised to these boats along with
their names was wonderful, beautiful and touching. Only one called Aero
II, which reminded me of aerial warfare, did I pass over unaffably, just
as I'd been forced to avert my glance from certain overly deformed faces
in the bar which I'd just come from.

Upstairs at Basso's the tricks commenced for the first
time when I looked down. The square in front of the port was, to put it
best, like a palette on which I mixed the local colors at random, probing
this way and that, irresponsibly if you will, but like a great painter who
views his palette as an instrument. I was extremely reluctant to partake
of the wine. It was a half bottle of Cassis, a dry wine. A piece of ice
swam in the glass. It was, however, exquisitely compatible with my drug.
I had chosen my table because of the open window through which I could glance
down at the dark square. And when I did so from time to time it had the
tendency to alter itself with each person who set foot on it, as if it formed
a figure [in relation] to the person which, mind you, had nothing to do
with how he saw it, but rather was closer to the view of the great portraitists
of the 17th Century who cast persons of title in relief by positioning them
in front of porticos and windows.

Here I must make this general remark: the solitariness
of such a rausch has its shadow side. To speak of the physical aspect alone,
there was a moment in the port tavern when a severe pressure in my diaphragm
sought release in humming. Furthermore, there's no doubt that many a beautiful
and illuminating thing remains dormant. But on the other hand, the solitariness
acts in turn as a filter; what one writes down the next day is more than
an enumeration of sequential events. In the night the rausch stands out
with prismatic edges against everyday experience. It forms a kind of figure
and is more memorable than usual. I should say, it contracts and in so doing
fashions the form of a flower.

To get closer to the riddle of bliss in rausch one must
reconsider Ariadne's thread. What delight [there is] in the mere act of
unwinding a skein. And this delight is quite profoundly related to the delight
of rausch, as it is to the delight in creative work. We go forward: but
in doing so not only do we discover the bends of the cavern in which we
venture forth, but rather we savor this happiness of discovery by virtue
of that other rhythmical bliss which comes from unraveling a skein. Such
a certainty from the intricately wound skein that we unravel - is that not
the happiness of at least every prose form of productivity? And under hashish
we are prose beings savoring at the peak of our powers. De la poésie
lyrique --pas pour un sou.

At a [public] square off the Cannebière where the
rue Paradis runs into promenades, an all-engrossing sensation of happiness
came over me which is harder to get a grasp of than everything prior to
this point. Fortunately, in my newspaper I find the sentence: " By
the spoonful one must draw sameness [das Gleiche ] out of reality ".
Numerous weeks prior to this I'd read a sentence by Johannes V. Jensen which
seemed to say something similar: "Richard was a young man who had a
sense for everything in the world of the same kind." This sentence
had quite pleased me. It now enabled me to confront the political-rational
sense that it had for me with yesterday's experience of a individual-magical
one. Whereas Jensen's sentence meant for me that things are, as we certainly
know, so thoroughly mechanized [and] rationalized that whatever today is
particular lies hidden in the nuances only, the insight yesterday was completely
different, namely, I saw nuances alone; and they were the same. I became
inwardly engrossed in the pavement in front of me. By means of a kind of
salve - magic salve- that I glossed it over with, so to speak, this very
same pavement could have been Parisian pavement. One often talks about stones
for bread. Here these stones were the bread of my imagination, which thereupon
had suddenly become voracious to taste that same something of all locales
and countries. During this phase as I sat in the dark, the chair against
the wall of a house, there were fairly isolated moments of [an] obsessive
character [Suchtcharakter]. I was immensely proud to think of sitting
in Marseilles here on the street in a hashish rausch ; certainly who else
shared my rausch here, on this evening, how few. As though I were not capable
of sensing the danger of approaching misfortune and loneliness, the hashish
was ever to remain. In this thoroughly intermittent stage a nearby nightclub's
music, which was following me, played an extraordinary rôle. [It]
was peculiar how my ear made a point of not recognizing "Valencia"
as "Valencia". [Gustav] Glück [16]
drove past me in a taxi. It was a fleeting moment. It had been strange,
just as, earlier, [Erich] Unger [17] had suddenly
emerged out of the shadows of the boat on the quay from the form of a harbor
dead beat and pimp. And when I discovered some such literary figure again
at a nearby table at Basso's, I said to myself that I had finally found
out what literature was good for. But there were not only familiar figures.
Here in the stage of the deepest reverie, two figures - philistines, vagrants,
who knows - passed by me as "Dante and Petrarch". "All men
are brothers." Thus began a train of thought which I can no longer
follow. But its final segment was certainly much less banal than its first,
and led perhaps into animal imagery. But that was at a stage other than
the one at the port, from which I find the short note: "Acquaintances
only and beauties only " --namely, the passers-by.

"Barnabus" stood on an electric tram which briefly
came to a stop in front of the square where I was sitting. To me, though,
the sad and desolate story of Barnabus seemed no bad destination for a tram
outward bound for the city limits of Marseilles. Around the door of a dance-hall
a very beautiful scene was taking place. Every now and then a Chinese man
in blue silk pants and luminous rose-colored jacket emerged. That was the
doorman. Girls made themselves conspicuous in the doorway. I was in a very
contented mood. It amused me to see a young man with a girl in a white dress
coming out and to jump to the conclusion: "She gave him the slip in
there in her chemise and he's claiming her back to him again. That's it."
The thought of sitting here in a center of every revelry flattered me, and
by "here" I was not referring to the city but to the little, by
no means eventful spot where I was sitting. But the manner in which the
events occurred was such that the outward appearance touched me with a magic
wand and I became engulfed in a dream about it. At such times people and
things behave like those stage props and mannequins made out of elder pulp
in the glazed tin-foil crate, which become galvanized by rubbing the glass
and with each movement involuntarily enter into the most bizarre relationships.

The music, which meanwhile continued to blare and subside,
I called the straw scourge of jazz. I've forgotten the reasons with which
I permitted myself to tap my foot to the beat. That goes against my upbringing,
and it did not happen without inner conflict. There were times when the
intensity of the acoustic impressions crowded out all the others.

Most of all, it was the din of voices, and not the streets,
which drowned out everything in the little port bar. The strangest thing
about this noise of voices was that it sounded entirely like dialect. The
people of Marseilles suddenly did not speak a good enough French to me,
you might say. They had stopped short at the dialect stage. That phenomenon
of alienation, which may be implied, and which Kraus has formulated with
the fine adage "The closer one looks at a word, the further away it
looks back" appears to refer to things here, too. At any rate I find
among my entries the astonished note: "How things resist one's glances."

The effects wore off when I crossed the Cannebière
and finally turned the corner to have just a little ice cream in a small
Café des Cours Belsunce. It was not far from that other, first café
of this evening where the lover's bliss which the contemplation of some
fringe ruffling in the wind imparted suddenly convinced me that the hashish
had begun to take effect. And when I recall this state, I'd like to think
that hashish, in relation to nature, possesses the force and power of persuasion
to allow us to recapture the great squandering of one's own existence, which
we savor when we're in love. For when we are in love for the first time
and our existence slips like gold coins through nature's fingers, which
cannot hold on to them and must lavishly spend them in order to obtain the
new being, the new-born, then, without hoping or expecting a thing, she
flings us with both hands full toward existence.

A divided, ambivalent course of events. A positivum:
the presence of Gert,[18] who through apparently
quite extensive experiences of this sort (hashish was obviously something
new to her) became a force boosting the effects of the toxin. Just how much,
to be discussed later. On the other hand, a negativum: insufficient
effect upon her and Egon, due perhaps to the inferior quality of the preparation,
which was not the same as the one I took. Not being sufficient, Egon's narrow
lodgings were entirely inadequate and such a poor nourishment for my dreams
that I kept my eyes shut for almost the entire session. This led to experiences
which were completely new to me.

If contact with Egon was nil, when not negative, then contact
with Gert had too sensual a hue to make a purely filtered intellectual yield
of the undertaking possible.

Nonetheless, I see from certain notes of Gert that the
rausch was so deep that the words and images have vanished from me at a
particular stage. Since contact with other people, moreover, is essential
to attain intellectually and linguistically articulated utterances, it can
be inferred from the above that the insights this time were out of proportion
to the depth of the rausch and the enjoyment, if you will. All the
more reason to emphasize just what it was that seemed to be the core of
this session, not only in Gert's notes but according to my own recollection.
These are the pronouncements I made about the nature of the aura. Everything
I said then was pointed polemically at the theosophists, whose inexperience
and ignorance I found highly obnoxious. And in opposition to the conventional,
banal notions of the theosophists, I posited three aspects of the genuine
aura, albeit unsystematically. First of all, the genuine aura appears in
all things, not just specific ones as people imagine. Secondly, the aura
changes completely and fundamentally with each movement made by the object
whose aura it is. Thirdly, the genuine aura can in no way be thought of
as the immaculate, spiritualistic magic ray as depicted and described in
vulgar, mystical books. On the contrary, the distinguishing feature of the
genuine aura is: the ornament, an ornamental periphery [Umzirkung]
in which the thing or being lies fixed, as if confined in a sheath. Nothing
conveys as accurate a conception of the genuine aura as van Gogh's late
paintings, which could be described as all things painted with their accompanying
aura.

From another phase. First experience I had of audition
colorée. I was not very attentive to what Egon said because my hearing
immediately converted his words into the perception of colorful, metallic
glitter which coalesced in patterns. I made this understandable to him by
comparing it to the knitting patterns which we loved as the beautiful colored
plates of "Herzblättchens Zeitvertreib" [Darling's
Diversions] when we were children.

Even more remarkable perhaps is a later phenomenon connected
to how Gert's voice sounded to me. That was at the moment when she gave
herself a shot of morphine, and I, not having had any knowledge of the effects
of this drug aside from what I'd read in books, was able to describe her
state to her in a fully penetrating and accurate manner based --as I myself
maintained-- on her intonation. Otherwise, this turn of events --Egon's
and Gert's veering off into morphine-- was, to a certain extent, the end
of the experiment for me; but a highlight as well, I must admit. It was
the end because the enormous sensitivity evoked by the hashish threatened
to turn every inability to be understood into a source of suffering, which
I suffered then, too, since "we had parted ways from each other".
At least that is how I formulated it. It was a highlight because of this
subdued but persistent, sensual relation to Gert which I now felt as she
fiddled with the syringe (an instrument to which I have a considerable aversion),
nor could I help being influenced by the black pyjamas she wore --for this
whole relation then took on a black hue, to which her repeated and stubborn
attempts to induce me to take morphine were unnecessary for her to appear
to me as a kind of Medea, a lady poisoner from Colchis.

Some remarks on the characteristic of the zone of vision
[Bilderzone]. If while talking to someone we notice that this person
is smoking a cigar or pacing back and forth in the room, etc., it comes
as no surprise to us that, being unconscious of the effort we expend in
speaking to him, we are still capable of following his movements. An entirely
different picture is presented, however, when the images we see before us
while speaking to a third party have their origins within ourselves. In
ordinary states of consciousness this is, of course, not an issue. On the
contrary, suppose such images arise, even arise incessantly, they nonetheless
remain unconscious. In the hashish rausch the situation is otherwise. It
is possible, as this evening proved, for a virtually tumultuous production
of images [19] to take place independently of any
residual fixation and orientation on the part of our attention. Whereas
images arising spontaneously in ordinary states, of which we are not in
the least aware, remain for that very reason unconscious, the images in
hashish obviously do not require our attention at all for them to show themselves
to us. To be sure, the production of images can unearth such extraordinary
things so fleetingly and with such rapidity that we cannot manage to pay
attention to anything else on account of the beauty and peculiarity of this
world of images. Such was the case that --as I now formulate it in a lucid
state with a certain proficiency in imitating hashish formulations-- every
word of Egon's I heard detained me from an distant journey. As for the images
themselves, I can no longer say much more than that they were small in scale,
for they appeared and disappeared with tremendous rapidity. They were essentially
objective, but often with a considerably ornamental overlay. Things with
such an overlay are preferred: masonry, or example, or archways or certain
plants. At the very beginning I formed the word "Strickpalmen"["Stitchpalms"]
to designate what I saw. Palms with a certain amount of meshwork, like petticoats,
I explained. Then entirely indistinguishable images like those familiar
to us from surrealist painting. For example, a long gallery of suits of
armor which concealed neither soul, nor heads; instead flames played around
the opening at the neck. A terrific peal of laughter from the others was
released by my "Decline of the Art of Cake-Baking." The matter
was as follows: for a time giant, larger-than-lifesize cakes appeared to
me. Like standing in front of a lofty mountain, the cakes were so gigantic
that I could only see part of them. I launched into detailed descriptions
of how such cakes were so consummate that it was not necessary to eat them,
for they immediately stilled all appetite through the eyes. And this I called
"vision bread" [Augenbrot, literally "eye bread"].
Just how I happened to coin this phrase, I can no longer recall. But I believe
that I'm not mistaken when I construe it in the following way: nowadays
one is required to eat the cake and therein lies the blame for the decline
in the art of cake-baking. The coffee which was poured into my cup I treated
analogously. For a good quarter of an hour I held the cup full of coffee
suspended in my hand, explaining it as being beneath my dignity to drink
from it, and I transformed it, to a certain extent, into a sceptre. How
one can speak of the hand's need for a sceptre in hashish. This rausch was
not very rich in coinages. I recall a "Haupelzwerg"[20], a concept which I tried to convey to the others. More
intelligible is my reply to one of Gert's utterances, which I took up with
my customarily unbounded disdain. And the formula of this disdain was: "What
you say means as much to me as a Magdeburg rooftop."

Particularly striking was the beginning, in the first phases
of the rausch, when I compared things to the instruments of an orchestra
which are tuned before the performance begins.

7/8 June 1930. Extremely deep hashish depression. Felt
passionately in love with Gert. Left completely forlorn in my armchair;
agonized at her being alone with Egon. And on top of everything, he is unusually
jealous as well; continually threatened to throw himself out the window
were Gert to leave him. But that is just what she didn't do. Certainly the
solid foundations of my sorrow were already there. Two days ago, a fleeting
chance occurrence at becoming better acquainted which revealed just how
much my sphere of activities has in fact narrowed, and not long before that
(a piano upstairs is bothering me) the noteworthy night with Margarete Köppke,
who insisted so much on my being a child that I distinctly gathered how
much she intended the opposite of man with the word, and who impelled me
so much towards my own kindred. I found at least three of the components
in Bloch's formula: poor, old, sick and forsaken to be applicable to myself.
I have doubts whether things will turn out well for me. As for country,
locality and position, means of living, the future holds only the most uncertain
prospects for me. Many friends, but I pass from one hand to the next. Many
accomplishments, but none to make a living from and many which are a hindrance
to my work. It was as if these thoughts wanted to hold me captive; and this
time they did so, too, with ropes, so to speak. How inclined I was to see
revelations behind all of the insulting things Gert said, which she read
from my face, and to make Köppke's riddles with dates and warnings
my own. I am so sad that I must practically indulge myself uninterruptedly
in order to live. However, I was also quite determined to let Gert indulge
me. As she danced I drank in every line which she set into motion, and what
all couldn't I say about this dance and this night if Satan himself were
not playing piano upstairs there. I spoke while I was watching her with
the conscious sense of borrowing much from Altenberg[21];
words and figures of speech of his, perhaps, which I myself had never read
in his writings. While she was in the midst of her dance I tried to describe
it to her. The most exquisite thing was that I saw everything in this dance,
or rather, such an infinite amount that was clear to me; everything would
be inconceivable. What is the inclination of all the ages for hashish, of
the Kaffir himself or many words, thoughts, sounds --of Africa or of the
ornament, for example, compared with the red Ariadne's thread which offers
us the dance through its labyrinth. I allowed her every opportunity to transform
herself in essence, in age, in gender. Many identities spread over her back
like fog over the night sky. When she danced with Egon she was a slender
boy in black attire. Both of them cut an extravagant figure through the
room. Apart, she was quite in love with herself in the mirror. The window
in her back stood black and empty. In its frame the centuries receded in
a backwards motion while with each of her gestures --so I said to her--
she either took up a fate or let it fall, twisted it around her, coiling
herself tightly into it, or strained after it, let it lie there or leaned
amiably close to it. What odalisques do when they dance before Pashas, Gert
did for me. But then this flood of insulting words erupted from her which
she seemed to have pent up just before the final wildest outpouring. I had
the feeling that she was restraining herself, holding back the worst, and
in so thinking I would certainly not have deceived myself. Solitude then
followed, and hours later the attempt of brow and voice to console, but
by that time my grief within the recesses of the sofa bastion had intensified
too much and I was not to become rescued. Thereupon the most unspeakable
faces drowned along with me, [and] nothing, almost nothing [would have]
made it across to safety were there not floating on the surface of this
black flood the peak of a gothic church spire made of wood; wooden spire
trimmed with colorful, dark green and red panes.

W[alter] B[enjamin], a capsule at 9 o'clock, first effect
11 o'clock. Lying down, with eyes closed most of the time, completely calm.
My entries concluded at 1 o'clock. Approx. 1/4 hr. after the effects set
in he sticks his index finger straight up in the air; retaining this gesture
unchanged for at least an hour.

A depressive and euphor[ic] element continuously struggled
with one other. It was probably not this conflict alone, however, which
led to the difficulty or impossibility --felt negatively by the test subject--
of making any progress within the rausch toward the construction of thoughts;
rather, the effects of the Eukod[al][22] , which
subject took at 10:30 (0.02 subcutaneously), certainly played a part as
well. An additional feature belonging to the general characteristic [is]
that toys or colorful children's pictures thrust themselves to the fore
again and again.

Subject repeatedly makes vain initial attempts to meet
the rausch halfway; the left bedroom window played a part in this context,
just before the blue of the night sky assumed an unusual intensity and sweetness
under the influence of the h[ashish], which accounts for the explanation
later that the window had "something of the heart..."

"Crouching windmills from a children's book,"
agricultural images also returned later. There was an excursus about the
"field drum" ["Ackerwalze"] with ironic allusions to
the Osthilfe[23]. The field drum, whose
crank lies deeply hidden in the grain, is turned by a goblin and effects
the ripening of the seed.

His raised arm, or rather hand, "disguises itself"
covered with varicolored glazed paper. The subject explains that his arm
is "a look-out tower - or rather a look-in tower --images go in and
out-- he feels no pain."

It is at this phase that I am telephoned and my medical
services are urgently beckoned by a neighbor woman who lives on the same
floor. I promptly put myself in some semblance of order, stand up, whereby
subject seems to be extremely unhappy and utters: "Don't leave me alone,"
etc. I stay for about 10 minutes and return afterwards. Subject is lying
in exactly the same position, the index finger still pointing vertically.
He indicates that I have been very neglectful.

From subject's later pronouncements and recollections arose
the particularly impressive image of a staircase, which was later an "ice
staircase" whence an extract appeared in the spiral form of a smaller
than life-size winding staircase upon whose every step along the outer wall
a tiny, delicately colored doll-like figure appeared to be melting away,
which the test subject called "little doll man", conscious that
he was vulgarizing the state of affairs in a philistine manner. Later there
was also talk of a "little doll woman". All of it entirely fanciful,
smaller than life-size.

There now came a period in which vegetable forms stood
in the foreground. These mental images [Vorstellungen, representations]
were accompanied to some extent by a sadistic primary feeling. In this context
extremely tall trees which were slender and strictly symmetrical in form
played the main part. It did not take long before these trees became metallic.
The test subject gave to one of them the following explanation: the rigidness
and immovableness of this tree does not at all belong to its original nature,
which had once been something full of life. One still recognizes it in the
beating of both great wings, to the right and left beneath the treetop.
(Hence a variant of the Daphne motif to some extent). According to the subject,
the trees make snapping movements, they become "Schnap-trees"[24] , called "little Zopper-tree" [25] in an earlier context. (Compare this to what was
said about the "little doll man").--

The leitmotifs of the following sequence of images have
been designated by the test subject himself as "heraldic". At
the same time the image of rhythmically animated surfaces of water first
appeared, which lasted for a longer time. The visual mirror-relation of
heraldic emblems, the shifted correspondence which occurs just like crests
[Wappen, also "coats of arms"] in the mirror-images of
the water, becomes expressed by the subject with the verse:

This word order came as the finally satisfying one after
numerous other attempts. The subject set great store by this verse, in the
conviction that here the same mirror symmetry that dominated the images
of crests and waves also came to light in language --though certainly not
by imitating, but rather in original identity with the optical image. The
subject holds forth insistently: "quod in imaginibus, est in lingua".
The water continues to dominate the image-world. The mental image of the
sea which the waves were based on recedes, however, into the image of currents.
Its water actually never comes to light, i.e., it is covered over in layers
of fruit-like patterns, later plainly fruit, predominantly berries, which
lie stratified in tiny tartlet-like boats, which slide from one into the
next. The subject speaks of "Beerenwiegen" [berry-cradles],
"Zipwiegen" [onion-cradles][27]
or "garden-fruit cradles" as well. -- "All the seas and rivers
filled with little fruit cradles." The vegetable forms were finally
transformed into garlands, there was talk of a "science of garlands."

It seemed that a period of deep reverie (Versunkenheit,
immersion) then followed, from which the original protocol has retained
the sentence: "One hears not with the ears alone, but also with the
voice." The subject elucidates the sentence: in the rausch the voice
is not only a spontaneous but also a receptive organ; by speaking it explores,
as it were, that whereof it speaks. For example, when speaking of the stone
steps of a staircase, the voice mimetically receives the hollow spaces of
the porous stone in its own sonority.

An image without any controllable context arises: fishnets.
"Nets spread over the whole earth before the end of the world."
The world thereby empty of human beings, grey.

A short period of oriental images followed: "Elephants,
changing pagodas. The legs of the elephants sway like fir-trees."

A wood appears to the subject. He explains somewhat ironically
that people are always speaking about the allure of the woods. Well, why
do the woods lure them, then? One can experience this with Mexicans. To
the Mexican, going into the woods means to die. That is the reason why the
woods allure."

Test subject explains that he's having a "bad rausch".
He blames the morphine for his "demoralization". By demoralization
he means a small output of knowledge yielded in the rausch. Accordingly,
somewhat later on the subject explains that he's had "no proper rausch
at all, rather a decorative rausch and sales rausch." [Zierrausch
und Reklamerausch].

"Grotto made of fretwork", "fretsaw-nose"
["Laubsägenase"][28]and
then with an alteration of the consonants "Laufsägespiel"

In this connection then was the tale about the field-drum
(see above).

"Good, learned, playthings", later: new characteristic
of the rausch: "horse rausch", "plaster rausch" [Pflasterrausch],
"dainty, foppish and plastery" -- "everything inlaid like
marzipan..., must one differentiate sweets in the various domains of the
senses?" Evidently a more serious advance in the direction of knowledge
was planned here regarding that which made sweetness in the various domains
of the senses and experience possible. But at the time the only sentence
formulated which might indicate his viewpoint toward this epistemological
experiment was: "The knowledge of the sweet is not sweet."

"Box state...", "the images want to shut
one up inside a lonely chamber, should one enter them."

New characteristic of the rausch:: "Wertheimerrausch[29]: everything in mass quantities." (Compare
with the above-mentioned currents inundated with the same kinds of things.)
Subsequent to this: "One would have to persevere, that there be very
many people like oneself." This sentence was surely not coined solely
with regard to the spiritual, but rather specifically, perhaps above all,
with regard to corporeal appearance.

"Snowflakes... shaggy-heads... childish." The
subject describes in detail how snow is shaken out of "cotton bins"
from the sky.

"Images desire only their flux, everything is the
same to them."

"Remembrance is a bath."

With perhaps an allusion to the seductive sweetness of
the rausch, particularly the mo[rphine] rausch, it was then said: "to
cast intentions to the wind is a sportingly correct activity."

Later: "I would like to write something that emerges
from things like wine from grapes."

[Here there is a small lacuna in the protocol]

Later on the subject describes "an unbelievably high
Venice where one sees no sea." That the sea there is hidden or rather
becomes restrained is portrayed by the subject with a feeling of triumph.
He underscored that with the information on the "heraldic motto of
the city": "Venetiani non monstrant marem." Subject lingers
over Venice and speaks of "inauthentic, dim, enchanted lagunes."

"City with gardens where people take a little hashish"
(A kind of greater, more blissful allotment garden) "Advantages of
the ha[shish] delight in general must be weighed unprejudicially."

A little fantasy follows whose kinship with some of Kubin's
[30] notions was declared by the subject himself.
"That is the story of the garret-milliner, who modeled the garrets
of the city according to the forms prevailing at the time."

With the remark that the "the Swiss of the Pope"
are to have been from "Saxon Switzerland" the protocol came to
a close.

Fritz Fränkel: Protocol of the Experiment of 12
April 1931 (Fragment.)

W[alter] B[enjamin] O.4 gr. 11:15 p.m. (It became apparent
later that the dose was not sufficient for attaining a deep rausch.)

A certain negligible effect came on after three quarters
of an hour but was greatly assisted in an obvious manner by the test subject.
One remark is particularly interesting in the context of the following protocol
where a "concurrence between yellow and green" is mentioned. The
remark was occasioned by the sustained contemplation of a piece of tinfoil.

"Halos are mountain resorts for angels." "The
heavenly Jerusalem is a mountain air resort." That is important. Conversely:
"[The] high-altitude resort is a religious concept."

"If Freud psychoanalyzed the Creation, then the fjords
would not come off well."

"Rüststadt [Scaffold city]: Old city of
cast-off scaffolding erected for the sunset. The city can be called Roughneck."

A dog barks. Subject speaks of a jagged dog and explains
barking as an acoustic serration. In contrast to the jagged dog is posited
the refined dog, i.e., a quiet dog. (Implicit is the idea that the dog is
unrefined because he barks).

"That's more Simulin than hashish." This remark
made especially clear the test subject's suspicion of the preparation's
quality, which preoccupied him throughout the beginning [of the experiment].

"We'll make this Enoch the deadhead [Zaungast,
also "looker-on"] of this meeting." When I laugh at this
the subject remarks: "one cannot talk to ameratsim." [32]

Subject suddenly shouts in a military tone of voice: "Halt,
ap-penned-tion!" [33] This manner of
speaking was to recur later. Trust in the quality of the preparation begins
to make itself apparent. Subject expresses the opinion that it is a preparation
for "seesawing". Two different states of mind are concentrated
in this remark: first of all, it takes into account the phase-like character
of the process. Secondly, however, there is the ever persisting mistrust,
in which case the seesaw swings between sobriety and rausch.

Test subject notices a crumpled piece of paper next to
a bottle on the little table and in an overjoyed tone designates this "little
monkey", or rather "little stereoscopette monkey" [Stereoskopinäffchen],
"little stereoscopette". In keeping with the quite light and friendly
character of this rausch, the droll relation subject has to his own Dasein
does not reveal itself through haughtiness and distance, as is normal. Subject's
elation has instead the opposite effect, namely as sensitivity to things,
above all to words. Test subject uses a remarkable number of diminutives.
The prior incident with the word "little stereoscopette monkey"
is therefore quite indicative of how the hashish rausch effects a kind of
volatilization of mental images into word-aromas, though here, for example,
the actual substance of the mental image in the word --the stem: monkey--
completely evaporates.

Mistrust reemerges: test subject declares that "it
all has no effect" and then in a military tone of voice: "Quiet;"
he looks at the crumpled ball of paper again and calls to it, "Come,
little monkey," "the monkey's monkeying around," "to
monkey around" [äffen], "to ape" [nachäffen],
"to pre-personate" [voräffen]. [34]

A dog on the street that has been barking for some time
is designated by the test subject as "hashish hound". [35]

Mistrust reemerges for the last time. Subject expresses
that there is "no trace of an effect" but then various objects
begin to arrange themselves in such a way that "I could be having an
effect". The room we find ourselves in is called an "unattractive
room" where, according to the subject, "oriental palaces belong,
I don't dream of picturing it myself, in such a way that would do palaces
justice." Furthermore, subject expresses his desire "to see something
beautiful".

Subject picks up a newspaper and seriously attempts to
read it, showing no preoccupation with inner aspects of the rausch. At any
rate, reading the news was not a success; whether the reasons were mental
or physical cannot be ascertained; evidently from both; in any case the
comprehension of the printed letters on the page was hindered by entoptic
scomata. Test subject feels mysteriously amused by the driest political
slogans. Ironic wordplay with the names Frick and Munter. [36]
"Pu-pu-public peace, respect and order."

At this point, subject stepped over the threshold of the
actual rausch.

"All the colors are advancing from the snow -- you
have to pay attention to colors."

As in earlier experiments, test subject holds his forearm
and index finger straight up in the air, supported by his elbow. "Perhaps
my hand will slowly turn into a little tendril." It is now most unusually
characteristic that either simultaneously with this remark or immediately
thereafter, subject's mental image of his hand branching out into tendrils
was followed by the image of his hand becoming overgrown with hoar-frost.
This mental image, however, absolutely did not enter into speech during
the rausch; on the contrary, it had its actual function in the perpetual
process of becoming postponed, so that for long stretches of the rausch
one can speak of a technical construction of a Rahmenerzählung
[link and frame story, story within a story]: two limbs of a mental image
branch off from one another, raising the whole profusion of images in the
space between to a new phase. One has to negotiate, so to speak, the "open
sesame" which is directed at the mental image. The mental image itself
splits in two, opening the doorway to new treasure chests of images. This
constantly repeated mechanism comprises one of the most amusing moments
of the hashish rausch.

"Everything commences with an effortless 'perhaps'."

"Vermin go home" ["Ungeziefer gehen sie
nach Hause"].

"The cylinder is the extension of the man."

Test subject is once again occupied with the room, now
in a far more amiable mood than before. He calls it "little room,"
saying "little room, I'd like to say something beautiful to you."

In a context which can no longer be recalled, the subject
has the urge to characterize one of his remarks as a digression. For that
reason the expression 'curve in the glazing' occurs to him. That was connected
to an optical image that entirely corresponded to the word.

Test subject no longer has any doubt now concerning the
efficacy of the preparation and says: "The Merck firm has stood the
test." Subject has "a parade ground full of thoughts" and
then says "the little room and the preparation comprise a Tempelhof
Field full of thoughts." [37] Test subject
returns to the subject of colors, beginning with his pronunciation of the
word green [grün] in a very drawn out singing cadence (approx.
20 sec.) and then says: "green is also yellow."

Whatever this last remark refers to in the first place,
it means nothing more than what it says, but perhaps more than what it says.
It is based upon the experience of a mental image of something yellow next
to the image of something green at the same time as the singing ü-sound
in grün. Best would be to circumscribe these in the image of
a swelling meadow whose periphery releases yellow sand. As for the perseveration
of the word grün : here for perhaps the first time the intensely
pathic accent of the rausch manifests itself, later becoming more and more
potent in effect. The long, drawn out vowel contains it, so to speak, in
the sense that the voice is drawn from the tone; just as the green was characteristic
of something attractive, alluring, and leading into the ever more remote
distance. "As the clouds wander in the heavenly canopy", so does
the voice wander after the tone and the inner view after the things at this
stage of the rausch. Therefore, when it is said that yellow is also green,
what is roughly meant is that the yellow which appears to the inebriate
draws the green along with it in gentle but irresistible currents.

"Thoughts of colors are tender, just as Norwegians
and flowers are tender; tender and ardent." (This observation characterizes
itself as a moment of a brighter phase by the arbitrary, associative memory
coming into play.)

What is apparently the deepest stage of the rausch begins.
With a long and involved introduction, there begins the revelation --postponed
over and over again-- of secrets. Unfortunately, the second of these secrets
is not to be found, for at this point the protocol's transcriber was quite
resolutely forbidden to take down notes. This judgment to a great extent
testifies to the depth of the rausch, for in less profound stages the inebriate's
vanity is quite pleasantly affected by the fact that his words are being
recorded. The first of these secrets:

"It is a law: there is only a hashish effect when
one is talking about hashish."

The subject urgently insists that the window be closed,
no doubt because he feels disturbed by the noise coming from outside. I
shut the window, which elicits the most appreciative thanks. Within this
context there follows a speculation about the 'good deed'. "When someone
has done something good, then perhaps it turns into the eye of a bird."

Concerning this matter it is to be observed: it is as usual
as it is characteristic of the hashish rausch that speaking is connected
to a kind of resignation, that the inebriate has already renounced expressing
what really moves him, that he makes an effort to give expression to something
parenthetical, something not serious instead of something authentic, but
inexpressible, that he not infrequently speaks with the sense of being guilty
of insincerity and that --and this is the most remarkable thing, needing
some clarification-- the things expressed in ruptures, so to speak, may
be far more remarkable and profound than that which would correspond to
"what was intended" [Gemeinten].

The scratching of the pencil across the paper strikes the
subject "as scratching across silk," "little scratchette".
This word is repeated several times. Test subject announces that he is having
"a terrifically potent effect, connected with the most powerful things
I've ever felt in hashish." The kind of rausch now appears to him as
"indescribably festive". At this point the transcriber of the
protocol was resolutely forbidden to take notes and the second secret was
disclosed. The mental image was for the most part that of a narrow place
surrounded by very tall houses, the roofs of which ended in what was almost
an arch. The feeling connected with this image was of unparalleled festiveness
that there was architecture spoiled so habitably by inhabitation and at
the same time uninhabited. The observation: "Everything overhead is
sealed off to me" was also in reference to this deep layer of images
which was otherwise only short-lived and appeared fleetingly. (This could
be compared to the representational scope of grave architecture.)

The test subject tells the protocol's transcriber that
he prefers not to be addressed in the familiar "du" (you) form.
Reason: "I am not I, I am the hashish in certain instances." Physical
symptoms are also especially strong in this stage. "The legs like they're
laced together", "spasm" [Spasmus], then subsequently
"Spasmus Sempers Jugendland ," [38]which is characterized by the test subject as an "epileptic novel."

The sentence that now follows: "Important thoughts
have to be tempered somewhat in sleep" may be related to the previously
mentioned tendency to postpone expressing one's thoughts, a tendency which
now and then can lead, as stated, to their complete repression. In a "deep
phase, which I practically stumbled upon by accident; terrifically deep"
there follows the third "great" secret. This is in fact a synopsis
of the fundamental character of this particular rausch. It is characterized
as the secret of wandering. Wandering is not based on a purposeful movement,
nor a spontaneity, but rather a plainly unfathomable sense of being drawn,
wandering is a pathic state, one could illustrate it by comparing it to
clouds; supposing one could intuit their drift, they would be found not
to draw but to be drawn.

"Color needs only to throw shadows."

"No one will be able to understand this rausch, the
will to awaken has died."

The chocolate which is offered to the subject is declined
with the words: "food belongs to another world"; he is supposedly
"prevented from eating by a dividing wall of glass."

"The subject of a veiled face which is itself a veil
is much too ethereal to allow for further discussion; only hashish knows
about that."

It is to be noted here that the apparition of that veiled
face which was itself a veil was of such an unprecedentedly striking quality
that it was still clear in the subject's mind days later. It was a small,
oval head; behind the veil was another veil, patterned precisely after the
form of a face. These veils were not hanging but instead were moving gently,
stirred as if by an exhalation.

"All noises swell together by themselves in landscapes."
I heave a sigh, to which test subject remarks: "The sigh. . . like
prospects; we have already heaved prospects in sighs." (The distance
stretched out before his eyes as if exhaled into view. The distance draws
closer to the breath to the same extent that it distances itself from view.)
The problem of the connection of the senses was raised, and the depth within
the same or different layers with which they extend.

The mood changes abruptly. Test subject suddenly shouts:
"The rausch is turning!" and repeats the utterance, laughing,
that he suddenly happens to be in "an operetta mood." Furthermore,
there was complete consciousness of the potency of the rausch, which was
made apparent with the remark: "the rausch could last 30 hours."

Support of arm and index finger is relaxed and then subject
holds his arm straight up in the air, calling it "the birth of the
kingdom of Armenia."

Earlier, when raising his arm: "Now we will turn our
gaze to the interpretation of the celestial bodies," his raised arm
acting here as a telescope.

No legitimation of crock is more effective than
the sudden awareness of its having helped to penetrate that hidden, generally
inaccessible world of surfaces constituting the ornament. We are surrounded
by it almost every day, of course. Nevertheless, little confronts us which
so breaks down our faculties of perception as it does. For the most part,
in fact, we rarely see this world at all. With crock, however, the
presence of it preoccupies us intensely: so much so that with the deepest
pleasure we playfully exhaust those experiences of the ornament which childhood
and fever made us capable of observing. These experiences are based on two
different elements, both of which achieve their peak effectiveness in crock
At issue here is the multiple significance of the ornament. There is not
a one that cannot be viewed from at least two sides: namely, as surface
pattern or else as linear configuration. In most of them, however, the individual
forms, which can be united in very different groups, are capable of a multiplicity
of configurations. This experience alone indicates one of the most intrinsic
characteristics of crock namely, its indefatigable willingness to
extract a multiplicity of sides, contents and meanings from one and the
same set of circumstances-- for example, from a decor or landscape painting.
In another context it will be shown that this multi-interpretability, whose
ur-phenomenon lies in the ornament, merely represents another side
of the peculiar experience of identity which crock discloses. The
other feature of the ornament which accosts the crock reverie lies
in its recurrence. It is highly characteristic of the reverie that it tends
to present before the smoker objects --particularly small ones-- in series.
The endless successions in which the same contrivances, little animals or
plant forms suddenly surface in front of the person over and over again
depict, so to speak, misshapen, barely formed sketches of a primitive ornament.

Along with the ornament, however, certain other things
of the most banal perceptual world [Merkwelt ] appear, whose inherent
sense and significance only crock can transmit. Among other things,
curtains and lace belong to this category. Curtains are interpreters for
the language of the wind. They give its every breath the form and sensuousness
of feminine forms. And to the smoker who becomes immersed in their play
they allow all the joys to be savored which a consummate dancer can vouchsafe.
On the other hand, if the curtain is filigreed it can become the instrument
of an even more curious play. For to the smoker, these laces prove themselves
to be patterns which he drapes over the landscape in order to transform
it in the most peculiar way. The landscape which comes into view behind
the lace is subordinated to the pattern in approximately the same way that
the plumage of birds or the shapes of flowers are subordinated to the pattern
in the arrangement of certain hats. There are old-fashioned postcards where
a "Greetings from Bad Ems" partititions the city into pictures
of the spa promenade, railroad station, Kaiser Wilhelm monument, school
and Caroline Hts., each one circumscribed in its own little frame. Such
postcards best conveyan idea of how the lace curtains exercise their
dominion over the view of the landscape. I tried to trace the flag from
out of the curtain, but it eluded me.

Colors can exert an uncommonly powerful impression upon
the smoker. A corner in S[elz]'s room was decorated with scarves hanging
on the wall. A pair of tumblers filled with flowers were sitting on a crate,
which was draped over with a lace scarf. In the scarf and flowers various
shades of red predominated. At an advanced stage of the fête I suddenly
discovered this nook. It had an almost deafening effect upon me. Instantaneously
I realized that, using this incomparable tool, my task was discover the
sense of the color. I called this nook the "Laboratoire du Rouge".
My first attempt to take on this project was not successful. I came back
to it later, however. At the moment, my only recollection of the attempt
is that the formulation of the question has been postponed. It was, granted,
a more universal one and concerned colors in general. It appeared to me
that, above all, their distinctive characteristic possessed form, [and]
that they were completely identical to the material in which they appeared.
Although they appeared completely the same in the most dissimilar things
--e.g. a flower petal and a piece of paper-- they appeared as mediator or
matchmaker of the material realm; only by means of them did the most distant
objects have the power of combining perfectly with one another.

II

A moralizing posture which obstructs essential insights
into the nature of crock has drawn attention away from a decisive
aspect of the intoxication. The question is an economic one. For it is not
overstating the case to say that a primary motive of addiction in very many
instances is this: to enhance the addict's suitability in the struggle for
existence [Existenzkampf ]. And this goal is by no means a fictive
one; on the contrary, it is actually attained in many instances. This comes
as no surpise to anyone who has been able to follow the increasing power
of attraction, which the toxin uncommonly often bestows upon the addict.
The phenomenon is as undeniable as its reasons are concealed. One can surmise
that in the course of the alterations which the toxin engenders, it also
interrupts a pattern of behavior which for the most part hinders the individual.
Unkindness, fanaticism about being correct, and pharasaism are traits which
one only seldom encounters in addicts. Add to this a sedative effect of
the toxin, so long as its potency lasts, and not the minutest factor is
able to justify the convinction that there could be virtually nothing significant
or worthwhile in taking the toxin. Now all this can give even those of a
more unassuming nature a sovereignty which they originally did not possess
- especially in their vocational capacity. Such a state of mind becomes
especially valuable to solitary individuals because it makes the changes
- in character and even physiognomy - known not only to others but also,
and perhaps more importantly, to the addicts themselves. While on the one
hand the mechanism of inhibitions has a tendency to express itself in a
hoarse, husky or suppressed voice, whose modifications are easier for the
speaker to perceive than for the listener, the disengagement of this mechanism
on the other hand --at least in terms of the subject's feelings-- makes
itself known by a surprising, precise, felicitous command of one's own voice.
It is very likely that the relaxation which these processes provide is not
always an immediate effect of the drug. On the contrary, in cases where
numerous intoxicated individuals congregate, there is still an additional
factor involved. Numerous drugs have the common property of intensifying
the enjoyment of gathering with partners so extraordinarily that not infrequently
a kind of misanthropy arises among the people concerned. Consorting with
others who do not share their practices seems just as worthless to them
as it is burdensome. It goes without saying that this charm by no means
always pivots around this conversational niveau. On the other hand, however,
the sense of something quite out of the ordinary, which such sessions have
for those who habitually organize them, is also more than a mere suppression
of inhibitions. It seems rather that something like a bond of inferiorities,
complexes and disturbances takes place among the various partners. The addicts
siphon off the dregs of their existence, so to speak; they have a cathartic
effect on each other. That this is bound up with extraordinary dangers goes
without saying. On the other hand, though, this circumstance can also explain
the great, often irreplaceable value which this vice possesses for precisely
the most current constellations of everyday life.

The opium smoker or hashish eater experiences the power
of imbibing at a glance a hundered sites from a single spot. Morning sleep
after smoking. It is, I then said, as if life had been like preserves sealed
up in a tin. Sleep merely the liquor in which it had been located and in
which it now, filled with all the fragrances of life, is decanted.

The first reaction time is characterized,above all,by the
prevailing mood. After 10 minutes an alteration in the mood of the subject's
situation occured, in the sense of dissatisfaction. F[ränkel] leaves
the room, which has been darkened, for a brief period of time, and W[alter]
B[enjamin] remains alone by the open window.

At F[ränkel]'s return, he describes his impression
from the window with the following words: "Were one, like a dead man,
to feel a longing for any beloved object from one's earlier life, this window
for example, then it would appear as it does so now to me. The lifeless
objects in one's presence can awaken a longing which one ordinarily recognizes
only at the sight of a person one loves."

In the following period of time the subject's displeasure
becomes, first of all, considerably more aggravated. This was outwardly
expressed in seemingly irregular motor symptoms like restless wallowing
in self-reproach [sich-umher-wälzen], erratic movements of the
arms and legs. B[enjamin] crumples into the couch of himself [gibt ein
Knautschen von sich], bemoans himself and his state of affairs, and
the indignity of it. He speaks of it as "impertinence". Attempts
a psychological diversion of the impertinence; characterizes it as the "misty
world of the emotional states" ["Nebelwelt der Affekte],
meaning that the emotional states [Affekte] in an earlier stage of life
have not been sharply distinguished yet, and that what one later characterizes
as ambivalence constitutes the rule; he also speaks about the wisdom of
impertinence in an attempt to draw closer to the same phenomenon, explaining
that the true foundation of impertinence is the child's displeasure that
it cannot conjure. The first experience that the child has with the world
is not that the adults are stronger, but rather that it cannot conjure.

During this time, subject develops a terrific degree of
sensitivity to acoustic and optical stimuli. At the same time, criticism
is expressed that the experimental conditions are unfavorable. Such an experiment
ought to be successful in a palm grove. Otherwise, the dosage he received
was said to be too negligible for B[enjamin]: a train of thought that surfaces
again and again throughout the course of the experiment, and which eventually
allowed irascible indignation to become expressed.

In the course of checking his pulse, B[enjamin] reveals
himself to be terrifically sensitive to the slightest touch. (Pulse itself
unchanged.) In the course of the discussion about sensitivity, the phenomenon
of tickling acquires a powerful significance. Attempt to explain tickling
as approaching a person a thousandfold, laughter as defense.

An observation that is connected to other innervations
and to another world of objects makes its relationship to a deeper stage
of the rausch known. Otherwise it becomes continually modified throughout
the course of its duration. This transformation of the subject's constitution
makes itself apparent primarily in observations about caressing, hemming
and combing. This mode of behavior becomes more or less connected to the
essence of the mother. Caressing: to undo what's been done, to cleanse life
in the river of time. It is the proper rule of the mother. Combing: the
comb in the morning is alone what drives the dreams out of the hair. Combing
is also a mother's work. (The stepmother combs with a poisoned comb: Snow
white.) There is also solace in the comb, and an undoing of what's been
done. Then the hemming: here the mother's observation devolves upon the
child: the hemming of the child, its dalliance: it unravels the fringe from
personal experience, plaits it; hence the child dallies. One could well
name dalliance the best part of his feeling of happiness. Eventually the
masculine comes to the fore in contrast to this world, becoming symbolized
as a trellis. "For the hem lies flat, and the trellis stands."

With eyes shut tight, subject denies seeing the appearance
of colorful images. Instead, B[enjamin] sees something ornamental before
him, which is described as ornamentation fine as hair. It recalls somewhat
the ornamentation which can be found on Polynesian oars. Ornamental tendencies
also make themselves evident in the conversation. Test subject gives a brief
example of this: in this context the refrain was characterized as the patterned
hem of a song.

B[enjamin] himself draws attention to the fact that when
he lights a match, his hand looks thoroughly waxen to him.

The light is switched on and Rorschach blots are laid out.
For the time being, they are rejected out of hand as insufferable.

"That is the same ticklishness."

In the meantime, the mood of sulkiness and disinclination
arises ever anew. B[enjamin] himself now calls for the Rorschach blots again
in order to get over it.

VII [41] is interpreted as a 7
standing on a 0. (As before, the images are once again rejected with the
remark: "I've already rejected that earlier." VII is described
as having aesthetic value. As F[ränkel] draws it somewhat closer, test
subject says: "Not any closer! I dare not touch it. If I touch it,
I can't say anything more." To clarify his interpretation of the 7
standing on the 0, B[enjamin] takes a sheet of paper and writes "7
stands upon the 0." A long period of time unconnected to the Rorschach
blots now follows. There is a creative writing game which begins with the
subject's observation that his handwriting is childlike.

The interpretation of II is given next as: Yakut women
who are touching one another; I is seen as two poodles, the one in the foreground
disappearing as a third poodle comes into view.

VII a r grey-blue: Pelican-lamb, a woolly little sheep.
The lullaby sketch is connected to this interpretation. B[enjamin] draws
attention to the embryo form. Embryo forms recur within the drawing. [See
figures 1 and 2].

III is interpreted as four Fates [Parzen]. The written
sketch illustrating the essence of witches in separate words is connected
to this interpretation. [See figure 3].

Renewed darkness. Peculiar hand positions occur in the
course of the next test period, which marks the deepest stage of the rausch.
The reclining subject stretches out his forearm, his hand spread out with
the fingers slightly bent. Now and then the position alternates with the
hand held upright. These respective positions are often held for long periods,
up to ten minutes. B[enjamin]'s important discussion about understanding
catatonic behavior is related to the observation of this phenomenon. Test
subject interprets the nature of catatonia on the one hand and elucidates
it on the other with respect to particular constellations of mental images
present at the time. He next calls attention to the fact that, upon opening
his eyes, he was surprised to discover that his hand was actually in a different
position than he had supposed. He adds to these words a very curious explanation
of his more or less magical influence upon the V.L. [Versuchsleiter,
test director]. He says, to wit: "The actual position of my hand is
completely different from what I am conscious of, which you can read from
the expression on my face. There arises for you such a terrific tension
between my facial expression and my body posture that this tension exerts
a magical power over you." A brief example from the catatonic's constellation
of mental images [Vorstellungskreis, also "ideational sphere"]
follows: "My hand," says the test subject, "is now just as
much a town fountain as it is the Queen of Sheba. It has a pedestal where
one can write whatever one wishes as a memorial:

The actual interpretation of catatonia is now the following:
the test subject compares the fixed position of his hand to the outline
of a drawing, which a draftsman has plotted once and for all. Just as it
is possible for the draftsman to continually change his figure into something
new, or give it new nuances by making innumerable alterations in the hachure,
by the same token it is possible for the catatonic person to change the
constellation of mental images associated with the catatonic behavior by
making miniscule alterations in the innervation. The extraordinarily economic
nature of this procedure represents a gain in pleasure. This gain in pleasure
is a matter of importance to the catatonic person.

A particular gesture made by the test subject sparks F[ränkel]'s
attention. Subject lets his raised hands, which are not touching, glide
from a distance very slowly over his face. The test director explains later
that he has simultaneously had the convincing mental image of flying. B[enjamin]
explains this to him: these hands draw together the ends of a net, but rather
than it being a net just covering his head, it was a net covering the cosmos.
Hence F[ränkel]'s mental image of flying.

Discourses on the net: B[enjamin] proposes a variation
on the seemingly insignificant Hamlet-question, to be or not to be: net
or mantle [43], that is the question here. He explains
that the net represents the night side and everything in existence that
makes us shudder. "Shuddering," he explains, "is the shadow
of the net upon the body. In shuddering, the skin imitates a network."
This explanation was connected to a shudder that traversed the test subject's
body.

When the question was raised whether F[ränkel] could
go home, a state of doubt and despair arose. Subject's breathing becomes
heavier, there is frequent moaning, violent jerking movements of the shoulder,
symptoms which had appeared before in a similar context. F[ränkel]
decides to stay, though that changes nothing regarding the test subject's
inconsolable sorrow. He calls sorrow the veil that hangs unmoved, longing
after a breeze that will lift it.

A joke is introduced: Elizabeth will not be able to rest
in peace until a Förster House has been made out of the Nietzsche Archive.
The image of the Förster House is extraordinarily vivid to the test
subject. In the course of his report it sometimes appears as school, other
times as hell or bordello. The test subject is a hardened and marred post
on the wooden railing of the Förster House. In this context he reflects
on some sort of wooden carving with animal and ornamental forms, which he
explains as the decadent descendants, as it were, of the totem pole. The
Förster House resembles something like those red brick structures which
adorn the pictorial broadsheets of model [houses] with an especially dark,
bloody red. Then, too, it also recalled those structures which are made
with stone block-anchors [Anker- Steinbaukasten]. Between the cracks
of the bricks grow tufts of hair.

Besides the net, the Förster House was the most vivid
of the mental images. Chamois foot in the Förster House: with the greatest
energy, test subject refers to the cockerel and the little hen on the Nußberg
[44] ("Nut Mountain"), and to the riffraff
where, to be sure, the Förster House would be located.

Incidental remark: that children can be trusted best with
sweets. These sweets reappear to subject's consciousness in the course of
a catatonic hand position when subject's hands are described as coated with
sugar. In addition to this, the secret of Struwwelpeter [Shock-headed
Peter] is to be revealed, but is forever withheld from the test director
by ever more solemn pronouncements. (Punishment for the meager dosage.)

The secret of Struwwelpeter: all these children
are impertinent only because no one gives them any gifts. The child who
reads him [Struwwelpeter], though, is well-bred because it has received
so many gifts already on the first page. A little shower of gifts falls
on the first page there from the dark sky. [45]
In showers [Schauer, both "shower" and "shudder"],
like the shower of rain, gifts fall to the child which veil the world from
him. A child must get gifts or else it will die like the children in Struwwelpeter
or go kaputt or fly away. That is the secret of Struwwelpeter.

Among the other observations: Fringe is very important.
One discerns weaving according to the fringe. Woolly nonsense.

Walter Benjamin: Entries to the Same Experiment

Essence of the Mother: To undo what's been done [Das
Geschehene ungeschehen machen]. To cleanse one's life in the stream
of time.

Feminine Work: hemming knotting braiding weaving

"Net or mantle - that is the question here"

Shuddering [Schauer] --The shadow of the net upon
the body. In shuddering the skin imitates a network. The net, however, is
the world net [Weltennetz]: the whole world is captive in it.

Hemming --the hemming of the child, dalliance: they pull
the fringe from personal experiences, braid them together. Therefore the
child dallies. "Dilatoriness" --one could call this the best part
of the feeling of happiness. First Faust experiences shuddering with the
Mothers, then comes the moment when he becomes dilatory. In the midst of
his masculine work, the moment surprises him. At that moment, the Mothers
fetch him home.

Two kinds of fabric: vegetable, animal. Tufts of hair,
tufts of plants. The secret of hair: on the borderline between plant and
animal. Between the cracks of the Förster House grow tufts of hair.

The Förster House: (she has made a Förster House
out of the Nietzsche Archive) The Förster House is made of red stones.
I am a post of its railing: a marred, hardened pole [Ständer].
[46] But that is no longer a totem pole, only a
pitiful copy of it. Chamois foot or horsehoof of the devil; a vagina symbol.

Net, mantle, hem and veil. Sorrow, the veil that hangs
motionless and longs after an exhalation that will lift it.

Ornaments delicate as a hair: These patterns, too, come
from the world of weaving.

Poem to the hand: This hand/ is of every hand [47] / my hand / is what it's called. It has a pedestal where
one can write whatever one wishes as a memorial. It is not located in the
place where I believe it is. The hand of the catatonic person and his desire:
with a minimal change in innervation he combines the maximum amount of change
in mental images. This conservation is his desire. It is like a draftsman
who has plotted the outline of his drawing once and for all time and now
extracts new pictures from it by means of a million continually new hachures.

Impertinence [Ungezogenheit, "ill-breeding"]
is the displeasure of the child regarding the fact that it cannot conjure.
His first experience with the world is not that the adults are stronger
but that he cannot conjure.

The desire that is connected to all of that lies hidden
in the coming-feeling of the phases.

The secret of Struwwelpeter: These children are
all impertinent only because no one gives them any gifts, and that is why
the child who reads him is well-behaved, because it receives so many gifts
already on the first page. A little shower of gifts falls there from the
dark night sky. Thus does it rain incessantly in the world of childhood.
In veils, like the veils of rain, gifts fall down to the child, which veil
the world from him. A child must get gifts, or else it will die like the
children in Struwwelpeter or go kaputt or fly away. That is
the secret of Struwwelpeter.

[1] The Potemkin anecdote from
Alexander Pushkin's Anecdotes was used twice by Benjamin: at the beginning
of the essay "Franz Kafka" (Schriften II, p. 196f.) [Trans.: see
"Franz Kafka" in Illuminations, by H. Zohn, Schocken Press, NY,
1969, pp. 111-112] and in the story "Die Unterschrift"
["The Signature"] in Prager Tagblatt 5. Aug. 1934 and Frankfurter
Zeitung 5. Sept. 1934. It can also be found under the title "Potemkins
Unterschrift" ["Potemkin's Signature"] in Ernst Bloch's
Spuren.

[7] Trans.
note: The term aufheben has acquired a particular importance in the
dialectical philosophies of Hegel and Marx. The English cognate "sublate,"
a term from chemistry has been used by some translators. The philosopher,Walter
Kaufmann, translated it "sublimate" in his translation of the
Preface to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.The term aufheben
means to cancel, destroy and preserve. In the oversimplification of
dialectics as thesis-antithesis and synthesis, the synthesis both cancels
the antitheses and preserves them in a spiral-like movement, whether it
be in the Hegelian sense of the movement of concepts towards Absolute Spirit
or in the Marxian sense of the dialectical evolution of economic formations.

[8] The Vossische
Zeitung carried in its title the Prussian coat of arms, the shield of
which depicted two half-nacked, muscle-less standard-bearers leaning against
one another in a symmetrical stance.

[9] A Prussian
town northeast of Wittenberg, [Trans.]

[10] Alfred
Graf von Waldersee (1832-1904), Prussian field-marshall, commander-in-chief
of the European forces in China during the Boxer Rebellion .

[11] Refers
to Benjamin's protocol.

[12]Palmström:
a volume of nonsense verse by Christian Morgenstern published in 1910. Palmström
is a character who appears throughout the poems.

[13] Translator's
Note: It should be noted here that Dr. Ernst Joël had been a friend
of Benjamin's ever since both of them were in the Youth Movement. In this
context, it is worth quoting from Benjamin's "A Berlin Chronicle":

"There in a back wing of one of the houses standing
nearest the municipal railway viaduct, was the "Meeting House."
It was a small apartment that I had rented jointly with the student Ernst
Joël. How we had agreed on this I no longer remember; it can hardly
have been simple, for the student 'Group for Social Work' led by Joël
was, during the term in which I was president of the Berlin Free Students'
Union, a chief target of my attacks, and it was precisely as leader of
this group that Joël had signed the lease, while my contribution secured
the rights of the 'debating chamber' to the Meeting House. The distribution
of the rooms between the two groups - whether of a spatial or a temporal
character - was very sharply defined, and in any case, for me at that time
only the debating group mattered.

My consignatory, Ernst Joël, and I were on less than
cordial terms, and I had no inkling of the magical aspect of the city that
this same Joël, fifteen years later, was to reveal to me. So his image
appears in me at this stage only as an answer to the question whether forty
is not too young an age at which to evoke the most important memories of
one's life. For this image is already now that of a dead man, and who knows
how he might have been able to help me cross this threshold, with memories
of even the most external and superficial things."

[14] Benjamin
probably did not participate in the experiment referred to here.

[15] This
protocol has apparently been lost.

[16] Trans.
note: Gustav Glück was a director of the foreign department of the
Reichskreditgesellschaft [Reich loan association] in the years before
Hitler. Concerning his friendship to Benjamin, see Gershom Scholem's Walter
Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, NY: Schocken, 1981, pp. 179-180, 231.

[17] Trans.
note: Erich Unger (1887-1952) had been part of the Neopathetisches Kabarett
and the circles surrounding the modern German kabbalist Oskar Goldberg.
See Scholem, op. cit., pp. 96-97, 108.

[18] Gert
Wissing, wife of Egon Wissing, Benjamin's cousin. [Trans.]

[19] Trans.
note: Benjamin's wording, "stürmische Bildproduktion"
conceals a pun which the English could more readily convey by translating
this phrase as "cataclysmic production of icons". Bilderstürmer
(iconoclast) and Bilderstürmerei (iconoclasm) are obviously
implied here.

[20] Trans.
note: A nonsense word. Zwerg is the German word for "dwarf".
"Haupel" is apparently made up, but could be suggested
by "Häuptel", the head of a plant or "Häufel"
a colloquial diminutive form of Haufe,a pile or heap.

[22] Trans.
note: Eukodal (also Eucodal or Percodan), known technically as Dihydrohydroxycodeinone
Hydrochloride "is a white crystalline powder derived from codeine,
used widely in Europe. It is used similarly to codeine and morphine, but
is much stronger than codeine therapeutically (dosage 3 to 5 mg) as well
as in addiction liability." (D.W. Maurer & V.H. Vogel, Narcotics
and Narcotic Addiction, (4th ed.), Springfield, Illinois: Charles C.
Thomas Publisher, 1973, p. 80).

[23] Trans.
note: Literally, "Eastern help", national subsidies to maintain
the bankrupt Junker agriculturalists east of the Elbe.

[24] Trans.
note: A play on the words schnappen [to snap] and Schnaps.

[25] Trans.
note: Untranslatable word play. Zopper is a dialect form of Zopf
(braid, pigtail, tress) and a colloquial word for rausch, as in the
expression "einen Zopf heimschleifen"(to
be drunken).

[26] Trans.
note: English unfortunately cannot replicate the onomatopoeia in this
letter-permutating word play. Literally: "Waves splash -- Coats of
arms swell". The mirror-images of water and heraldry are reflected
in the German, in which the words of the verse are brilliant mirror-images
of one another.

[32] Trans.
note: Yiddish, plural of amorets, an ignoramus. In the German text
the word is spelled Amarazzim.

[33] Trans.
note: Untranslatable word play. The German stillgeschreibt is meant
as a play on stillgestanden (the command "Attention!")
where the verb is not "to stand" at attention but "to write"
[schreiben] to a standstill.

[35] Trans.
note: It is quite possible that Benjamin is humorously alluding to an article
by Ernst Joël, "Beiträge zur Pharmakologie der Körperstellung
und der Labyrinthreflexe" (1925), which discusses the results of
hashish experiments with dogs and cats, and is mentioned at the end of Joël
and Fränkel's article on " Der Haschisch-Rausch" (1926).
Benjamin had opened his "Hashish in Marseilles" with a long quote
from Joël and Fränkel's article.

[36] Trans.
note: Wilhelm Frick (1877-1946) was the first elected Nazi official in Germany,
becoming Minister of the Interior in Thuringia (1930-1931) and National
Minister of the Interior under Hitler (1933-1943). He was found guilty by
the Nürnberg tribunal and was executed for "crimes against humanity".
Frick was in the news in April 1931 (perhaps in the very newspaper Benjamin
perused), having provoked the ire of conservative parties, who revoked his
introduction into Thuringia of Nazi school prayers, anti- jazz laws, and
an academic chair in racial "science".

[37] Trans.
note: Tempelhof Field was then and still remains the site of Berlin's airport.
At this time it was also the site of one of Germany's first film studios,
built between 1910-1914.

[38] A pun
on the autobiographical novel Asmus Sempers Jugendland [Asmus Sempers
Land of Youth] by Otto Ernst.

[39] According
to Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, the editors of Benjamin's
Gesammelte Schriften, the editor of the Suhrkamp edition of Benjamin's
Über Haschisch [On Hashish], Tillman Rexroth, had not been familiar
with the word, 'crock'. In GS VI: 824 they cite Jean Selz's explanation
of the word as follows: "The word crock does not exist in German
and must have been enigmatic to the reader of the Rexroth edition of 1972.
In fact, it is merely a slightly Germanized form of the French 'croc'
(hook). Of course, the meaning we gave it had nothing to do with this. It
was both an absurd and secret expression for opium. A few friends who smoked
had discovered the expression. I got it from them and imparted it to Benjamin.
We didn't know where special use of the expression had it its orgin. It's
possible that it derives from a sympathy with the vocabulary of Père
Ubu (in Alfred Jarry'sUbu Roi), who frequently speaks of
his 'croc à phynances'. The orthography employed by Benjamin
corresponds exactly to the way we had expressed the word (in French the
'c' at the end of the word is silent). - The word 'fête' as
well,which is used in 'Crock Notes' in its French form, belonged to our
particular language: it by no means designates a festival, but rather solely
the sessions during which we used 'crock." [Trans. by
S.T.]. According to V.H. Vogel & D.W. Maurer's Narcotics and Narcotics
Addiction (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 1973,
p. 401), 'crock' is defined as "an opium pipe" and "the
bowl of an opium pipe."

In his editorial notes to the 1972 edition of Über
Haschisch, Tillman Rexroth had stated that 'Crock Notes' most likely
" refer to a particular experiment which took place in 1932 in the
house of Jean Selz in Ibiza. It is precisely this experiment which is probably
referred to in the following passage from an undated letter of Benjamin's
to Gretel Adorno:

"When the evening had arrived, I felt very sad. Nonetheless
I detected that rare state of mind in which internal and external oppressions
counterbalance one another quite precisely, so that a mood arises in which
one is perhaps actually responsive to being comforted. This struck us as
being practically a sign, and after the long, expert and precise arrangements,
to which one attends so that no interruptions occur during the course of
the night, we began work around two o'clock. Chronologically speaking, it
was not the first time, but in terms of a successful outcome, it was. The
assistants, who demand a great deal of attention, were shared between us,
so that each servant and service rendered seemed more receptive, and the
conversation worked its way through the assistants like threads in a Gobelin
[tapestry] tinting the sky, weaving through the battle depicted in the foreground.
[Paragraph] What this conversation was about or what reasoning propelled
it along is something I am unable to convey to you in a concept. But when
the transcripts of subsequent sessions have reached a certain degree of
exactitude and been combined with others in the dossier you're familiar
with, the day will arise when I shall gladly read one or two aloud to you.
Today I've reached considerable results in the exploration of curtains ---
for a curtain separates us from the balcony which looks out over the city
and the sea."

[40] "To
me, the [red] handkerchiefs occupy a space between 'torch' and 'torchon'
[Fr. 'cloth']. Rot is like a butterfly alighting upon each shade
of the color red." See the comments
by Jean Selz regarding these observations.

[41] Trans.
note: Roman numerals here refer to the particular Rorschach blot in question.
In this psychological testing introduced by Hermann Rorschach in 1921, the
test subject's psychological make-up is evaluated according to his description
of what he/she sees in ten separate ink blots.

[42] Trans.
note: The German allerhand has the meaning of "of all sorts
or kinds" as well as "too much", "the limit", as
in "das ist ja allerhand!" (that's really too much!).

[43] Trans.
note: Mantle in the sense of the Weltenmantel, or World-mantle, a
concept related to the "world-soul".

[44] Trans.
note: A reference to Vom dem Tode des Hühnchens, one of the
fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

[45] Trans.
note: The word "shower" (Schauer) also means "shudder"
and is connected to the earlier passage on "the net". Furthermore,
this passage on Struwwelpeter is would appear to underscore Benjamin's
fascination with Kabbalah. The gifts falling from the dark sky suggest the
individual letters of black ink on the page, seen kabbalistically as angel
messengers bearing gifts of light.

[46] Trans.
note: the German word Ständer is not only "pole" but
also a vulgar term for "penis". The final word of this paragraph
underscores the sexual innuendo here.

[47] Trans.
note: The German allerhand ("of every sort" & "too
much" , "the limit") must be distinguished from aller
Hand ("of every hand"). Benjamin's entries are not the same
as Fränkel's regarding this point.

[48] Trans.
note: [Doing is a means to/ dreaming/ Observation is a means/ to stay awake].